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1 1_11_24_ Elections everywhere all at once.docx
2 1_12_24_ Hollywood’s secret musicals.docx
3 1_16_24_ Iowa Caucused.docx
4 1_17_24_ Cocaine problems.docx
5 1_18_24_ How the war in Gaza ends.docx
6 1_19_24_ Buy me to the moon.docx
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1 January Elections everywhere all at once \nHALF SECOND OF SILENCE\nBILLBOARD\nSCORING Funkyzeit \nNOEL KING host Some my employer Vox are calling it the biggest election year in HISTORY BILLIONS of people are expected to vote in elections in the next months \nTaiwan on Saturday is among the first Its a young democracy It first held a presidential election in Something Taiwanese are proud of\nCLIP VOTER I love the fact that Taiwan has done away with strong man politics A great nation doesnt need a strong man cult but a civil society Thats what makes a mature society\nNOEL As they go to the polls to pick a president Taiwanese will be choosing between a progressive candidate and a candidate who wants much closer ties to China The race is close though voters do agree on one thing \nCLIP THE GUARDIAN CORRESPONDENT AMY HAWKINS I spoke to lots of people on all sides of the political spectrum who made the point that democracy shouldnt be taken for granted or for me to defend And whoever theyre voting for theyre very excited to have that opportunity\nNOEL Thats coming up on Today Explained\nSCORING OUT\nTHEME\nNOEL Its Today Explained Im Noel King Amy Hawkins is The Guardians senior China correspondent Shes been covering Taiwans Saturday election where three parties are in contention\nAMY HAWKINS The Guardian Sr China correspondent Yeah So there are two main parties the Democratic Progressive Party the DPP which is currently in power and then the main opposition party which is the Kuomintang or the KMT which have historically ruled Taiwan but havent been in power for the past eight years And then theres this newcomer party called the Taiwan Peoples Party or the TPP which was only founded in and is disrupting the race a bit In terms of how to remember them I mean the Democratic Progressive Party is the most progressive of the three parties in terms of social affairs You know theyre the party that oversaw the legalization of gay marriage Theyve pushed gender equality So even though much of this years election campaign is about China and geopolitical issues you can think of the DPP as being the Progressive Party The Koumintang is the party that have historically come from mainland China It lost to the communists at the end of the Chinese Civil War and then fled to Taiwan They have this kind of very historic connection to China And then the Taiwan Peoples Party is the newest one\nNOEL Okay So if we hear DPP we think D for democracy \nAMY Yeah \nNOEL KMT Kuomintang committed Sounds a little like Kuomintang committed to China Thats how Im going to remember it\nAMY laughs Ok \nNOEL And TPP we dont have to think about them very much Theyre new \nAMY Theyre new theyre new yeah laughs NOEL laughs All right So um youve been there Youve been talking to voters What are the big issues in this election\nAMY So a major issue has been the question of how to deal with China and this is always a theme in Taiwanese politics Its especially prominent this time around\nCLIP VOTER Warships and fighter jets keep coming from China as intimidation When we have such an aggressive neighbor we must protect our territory \nSCORING Momentum\nAMY The history goes back to which was the end of the Chinese civil war in mainland China where the communists were fighting the nationalists The nationalists are the KMT\nNOEL Mhm \nAMY And so when they lost in the civil war they fled to Taiwan and declared the Republic of China based in Taipei while the Communists declared the Peoples Republic of China which is the communist country we know today in Beijing And ever since then its kind of been unfinished business for the communists to kind of defeat that last bit of KMT success And theyve always said they want to unify Taiwan with the mainland But Xi Jinping more than any other previous leader since Mao has made it a really top priority He seemed to see it as part of his legacy and with his getting older and he said that this problem as he described it cant be passed down from generation to generation In his New Years Day speech recently he said that \nCLIP CHINESE PRESIDENT XI JINPING The reunification of China is a historical inevitability and compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should join hands and share the great glory of national rejuvenation \nAMY and he hasnt ruled out the use of force to doing so And you know increasingly any kind of political cooperation with Taiwan looks less and less likely so that leaves fewer options that arent military force\nSCORING OUT\nAMY And then of course like any election lots of people care about the economy a lot for domestic issues particularly for young people Wages have been stagnant for a long time Housing is increasingly unaffordable People feel like there arent enough good jobs So the kind of issues that would motivate voters in any democracy are also very important in Taiwan\nCLIP VOTER My personal priority is to have a better life As for international matters like relations with China I feel that they are a little detached from us \nNOEL So lets talk through the three parties especially the big ones the DPP and the KMT Where do they stand Where do they stand on these issues Where do they stand in particular on China\nAMY Yeah So the frontrunner candidate is a man called Lai Chingte who is the current vice president to Tsai Ingwen Theyre from the DPP\nNOEL Democratic\nAMY The Democratic Progressive Party who are seen as being the most kind of proindependence Or they dont formally support Taiwanese independence but they are the most in favor of a sovereign Taiwanese identity thats very distant from China And Lai more than Tsai the current president has a history of promoting Taiwanese independence He previously described himself as a pragmatic worker for Taiwanese independence He is seen by some as being quite radical\nCLIP TAIWANESE VP LAI CHINGTE We must abide by the truth which is what I mean by pragmatism It is that Taiwan is already a sovereign independent country called the Republic of China Its not part of the Peoples Republic of China \nAMY But he massively kind of softened down that rhetoric in this presidential campaign because he doesnt want to seem like someone whos going to rock the boat \nNOEL Hmm \nAMY and someone whos going to provoke China and he very much kind of stayed close to Tsai Ingwens rhetoric which is about Taiwan doesnt need to formally declare independence because it already effectively is independent And through that strategy Tsai Ingwen has won lots of friends in Washington and around the world \nNOEL What about the KMT committed to China What is this candidate saying\nAMY Yeah So they KMT candidate the man called Hou Yuih hes a former police officer \nNOEL Ah \nAMY and quite popular mayor of New Taipei He has a quite kind of avuncular everyman persona \nCLIP TAPE OF HOU YUIH TALKING KMT RALLY TAPE \nAMY I was at a rally of his recently and rather than coming on the stage from behind the scenes he like walked through the crowds and \nNOEL Hmmm \nAMY everyone was grabbing him and you know trying to touch him like some kind of rock star And hes quite uh strategic clever pick for the KMT because theyve historically been seen as kind of more elitist out of touch party because theyre the party that came from China in and had ruled Taiwan for most of its history since then Theyve typically controlled the government theyve controlled the big companies and lots of Taiwanese people kind of see them as being the elite So through picking Hou Yuih as their candidate theyve kind of pivoting toward this idea of being the more everyman lookingoutfornormalpeople like workingclass party\nNOEL All right And then there is the TPP Were not paying them a ton of attention because they are the third party in this But tell me about who their candidate is and what this person wants\nAMY Yeah I mean the TPP is quite an interesting kind of disrupter to this race \nNOEL Ooh\nAMY because their candidate Ko Wenje who founded the party in he has made it really close Hes actually shown huge levels of support in recent weeks He had tens of thousands of people coming out to the rallies And some people do think hes been underestimated\nCLIP NATSOUND TPP RALLY \nAMY Hes a surgeon turned politician His pitch to voters that hes a pragmatist hes a technocrat Hes not the kind of political ideologue Hes just gonna look for a very practical way forward\nCLIP TPP CANDIDATE KO WENJE A real important principle is we have to think of a way to have dialogue with China and not just tell them no Because after no there is no other step \nAMY He doesnt have a huge amount in terms of concrete policies for dealing with China Hes focused more on domestic issues but that has proved really popular particularly with younger voters I mean there was polling from a few weeks ago which showed kind of huge amounts of support among under voters compared to the other two parties\nNOEL All right So the stakes for Taiwanese are quite high here The stakes for China are quite high here What about this election is so important that much of the rest of the world is glued to the outcome\nSCORING The Plot Thickens \nAMY I think its because you know whoever wins this election it will set the tone of crossstrait relations between China and Taiwan for years to come\nNOEL Hmm \nAMY And it comes at a moment when military and geopolitical tensions are kind of as high as theyve ever been And so if the DPP wins on Saturday you know there are many concerns that that could would really anger Beijing At the very least theyre likely to respond economically with trade sanctions on Taiwan And any conflict in Taiwan wouldnt just affect Taiwan it would affect the global economy would affect regional security even though its a very small island democracy it would have ramifications around the world\nNOEL That was Amy Hawkins of The Guardian Now during the break lets see how many countries can YOU name that are holding elections this year in Tweet your answers to seanrameswaram \nBREAK\nBUMPER\nNOEL Its Today Explained Bryan Walsh is an editorial director at Vox Now he wrote a piece for Vox in which he pointed out that it is not just Taiwan going to the polls People in more than FIFTY countries are gonna vote this year\nBRYAN WALSH Vox editorial director Presidential elections legislative elections governor elections local elections Its really a banner year for if not democracy at least the act of having elections\nNOEL laughs Can you name all the countries\nBRYAN I can definitely not name all the countries I can name a few of them\nNOEL Name the big ones \nBRYAN Okay Some of the big ones are Bangladesh actually which just had its election uh Sunday Talk about Taiwan which is going to have its election shortly Other big ones are Indonesia in February\nCLIP ARIRANG NEWS With current President Joko Widodo limited to two terms the country will choose a new leader\nBRYAN Pakistan India the single biggest democracy will have its general elections in April May\nCLIP FRANCE Prime Minister Narendra Modi is vying for a third term and by all estimates hes going to have a swift win \nBRYAN Europe will have its parliamentary elections in June And of course you know we have the United States coming up in November\nCLIP US PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN Whether democracy is still Americas sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time And its what the election is all about \nNOEL All right Lets situate Taiwan within this list that youve given us What are kind of the stakes in the Taiwanese election as you see them in this context\nBRYAN So the Taiwanese election is really interesting Taiwan was only became a democracy really in the s but now its really one of the most vibrant highlycontested fair and freest democracies in all of Asia And the real importance here is almost no matter who wins you will continue to have these tensions between Taiwan which views itself as kind of a de facto independent country even though its only recognized by a few countries diplomatically around the world And of course China which views Taiwan frankly as a rogue province that it intends to reunify by peaceful or other means at some point So that tension will continue And theres a real concern both because should you know forceful reunification happen should military action happen it could potentially wipe out as I said one of the best democracies in all of Asia But also it would obviously have major human cost if the US got involved It would also have really huge ramifications for the global economy Most of the semiconductors in the world the computer chips are everything from your phone to your car to your microwave are made out of Taiwan So uh it does quite matter whos in charge of that country It also matters uh whats going to happen after it\nNOEL Okay so you said something interesting there which is that in Taiwan there are many issues on the ballot but democracy itself is also on the ballot The same thing is happening in our United States democracy on the ballot right \nBRYAN Mhmm \nNOEL Is that going on elsewhere\nBRYAN Thats really the story around the world \nNOEL Oh \nBRYAN Really surprisingly few countries where you know you feel secure that no matter who wins you know democracy will continue And thats because by almost every standard of international monitor weve seen real democratic backsliding happening over the last ten years And what that means is that even as countries continue to have elections you begin to lose the real quality of democracy which is free and fair elections not just elections period You begin to sort of see where you know people in power will penalize or even criminalize their opponents Were seeing that in a lot of different countries\nCLIP AJ Its not often you see opposition party supporters gathered openly like this and they wont be allowed to for long This is an election in name certainly But theres only one political view that matters here and it isnt theirs \nBRYAN And the concern really is when we say democracy is on the ballot should the results of these elections be seen to continue to strengthen those kind of quasidemocratic autocrats youll start to see even less real democracy around the world You might still see campaigns you might still see elections but theyll be kind of not real \nCLIP SKY NEWS This is an announcement that will surprise no one Vladimir Putin saying he will run again for president \nBRYAN I mean even a country like Russia bout as autocratic as they come will have elections this year No one sees that this free no one sees that as a real democracy But you will still have a kind of like the skeleton of democracy the trappings of it but not the real quality not the real free and fairness that we value\nNOEL Yeah You know I want to dig in on that a bit more because when we say democracy is on the ballot we dont mean that its as simple as people go to the polls and theyre like hmm should I vote for the Democrat or the autocrat Its like laid out very clearly What does it actually look like at the polls when youre choosing between the more democratic option and the less democratic option What are some of the signs that you are laughing that you are in fact voting in one of these elections\nBRYAN Well I can give you an example of an election that actually just occurred on January th that was Bangladesh \nNOEL Mm \nBRYAN a very big country \nSCORING Pandemic \nBRYAN And in that case the party in power led by Sheikh Hasina really essentially all but outlawed the opposition such that they really made it impossible for them to compete on a fair level \nCLIP AL JAZEERA Zia is under house arrest on corruption charges that she says are politically motivated and her supporters have been jailed in their thousands after violent protests that began last October \nCLIP OPPOSITION POLITICIAN They have already executed the election process weeks ago This has been decided not in the ballot box but sitting in the capital in the office of the highest executive in the country \nBRYAN The opposition actually decided to boycott the elections altogether They decided they would not run because they saw it as a farce \nCLIP OPPOSITION POLITICIAN We are appeal to the people of Bangladesh not to attend the on th election Thank you\nBRYAN Which created a bit of a conundrum for the party in power because even autocrats even sort of these democratic autocrats they they crave campaigns They crave the authenticity that elections seem to confer So suddenly this party was faced with a situation where like Oh wait everyone can see that were running against nobody So they were actually putting some of their own members of their party to run against other members of their party just to give that sheen of democracy \nNOEL Huh \nBRYAN And the end result was yes they won but turnout was quite lower than it had been the past which I think is another sign that you tend to be in a situation where even the people in the country know that this is not quite real So when you see the criminalization of opponents when you see real concerns about the safety and security of elections of the vote itself when you start to see um the fact that these two parties or multi parties cant compete fairly on on the same level when you start to see real worries about misinformation or disinformation spreading on the internet those are all signs that you may be in an election where whatever other issues are on the ballot democracy itself is on the ballot as well\nSCORING OUT \nNOEL There have been um as you point out in your piece um there have been lots of other systems other than democracy Democracy is not guaranteed Right Its not like Oh you just get a democracy because you decide that you want one Is that one of the challenges that you see Bryan The fact that if you want a democracy you really do need to vote and to fight to get it to keep it\nBRYAN I think absolutely thats one of the the challenges Um elections are the quickest thing you can do in a democracy We know how those work but there are so many other things that need to happen to have a real free and fair representative government that go beyond an election You have to have norms about how elections are contested Actually you have to have norms about how politicians act in power Sometimes there are laws around them more often theyre simply social norms And look we know very well from the example United States and Donald Trump that even in a democracy that in many ways is the worlds oldest continuous democracy theres no guarantee that continues\nCLIP FORMER US PRESIDENT TRUMP THE GEORGIA PHONE CALL So look All I wanna do is this I just wanna find votes \nBRYAN And once those norms are broken theyre really hard to put back together And I think a last thing here is with these young democracies that often you initially have that experience you have a burst of freedom People really appreciate that But you know just because you have a democracy does not mean your country will be wellrun \nNOEL Hmm \nBRYAN doesnt mean youll have prosperity And often people can turn against democracy turn against those in power when they feel that their needs or before material or otherwise are not being met That is very difficult to to overcome Just because democracy is we think that its the freest system of government does mean its always gonna be the most efficient But all those together like you have not just I think a backsliding against democracy but a backlash against some of the the aspects of it that make it difficult to run really You know they make it a harder system of government than than other ones\nNOEL Right I mean this is why authoritarians at times seem very convincing right Its like oh somebody just takes power and like gets shit done Fine We dont we dont have to deal with the democratic process What is your informed take on what happens if is simply not a good year for democracy worldwide What does that look like\nBRYAN Yeah I think its its depressing quite honestly You know as I said weve had years of democratic backsliding Here in the United States which you know I agree with President Biden when he calls the US a beacon of democracy \nCLIP BIDEN the beacon of democracy to the world \nBRYAN And that shouldnt be understood as the the United States is a perfect democracy Rather it is a bellwether And if we cant keep it functioning here its very hard to see it functioning around the world Honestly if we continue to see this we see no arrest to this trend I do worry quite a lot about the future Id love to come up with a more optimistic spin on it Um other than to say that you know there have been cycles in the past that like sometimes you see you know growing autocracy it then overreaches You see a sort of civil movement that can push it back I would hope that happening in this case and of course I think its important to remember that as much as we worry about how fair these elections are going to be around the world it is really notable that this many people are participating in the democratic process in some way because that was simply not the case until fairly recently Uh you go back to the immediate postwar era A lot of countries obviously were not Democratic You had the entire communist sphere as well \nCLIP FORMER US PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN If we all work together to maintain and strengthen our democratic ideals communism will never be a serious threat to the American way of life \nBRYAN Go back even further and theres a handful of democracies at best Even countries like the United States really dont become liberal democracies meaning democracies where everyone has a chance to participate until the postCivil Rights era So even the opportunity to have democracy in the scale is fairly recent That makes me feel better I suppose But then I look at the more recent trends and I do get worried\nNOEL You know on Today Explained we covered the Polish election last year Poland famously was backsliding backsliding backsliding Then these elections happen and Poland slides forward \nCLIP POLISH PRIME MINISTER DONALD TUSK Poland won Democracy has won We have removed them from power This is one of the most beautiful days of Polands democracy and I have no doubt that this day will go down in history as a day that opens a new era and the rebirth of our republic \nNOEL That one really shocked me and made me think we all talk a lot about the death of democracy but you just never know what people voting are going to want What they decide is most important to them And sometimes it seems they decide this bigger ideal of democracy is more important then who can get the roads paved\nBRYAN Thats absolutely true And youre absolutely right about the Polish elections That surprised me as well It heartened me as well Uh and I think you know what happened there is is kind of characteristic of what could happen in situations where which is you had a party in power that was becoming increasingly autocratic It begins to overreach And even people who may not you know theyre not the people are going to go to the streets to to protest for democracy But they they dont want to live in a country where they dont feel free And that can lead to that kind of different backlash a backlash against that creeping autocracy\nSCORING Uneasy Street \nBRYAN And one thing to keep in mind is that you know when you look around the world there was a really interesting survey done by Open Society Foundations last year people across countries more than of them said they wanted to live in a democracy And when I look at that what I what I take from it is that there is a closetouniversal yearning for democracy It is seen as the type of government that one should have in the world today and if they can keep that focus I mean that that does give me some hope for the future \nNOEL Bryan Walsh Vox Todays episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn Amina alSadi is our editor and David Herman is our engineer Laura Bullard did Gods work on todays show Shes our factchecker Im Noel King Its Today Explained \nSCORING OUT \n SECONDS OF SILENCE
2 Hollywoods secret musicals\nHALF SECOND OF SILENCE\nBILLBOARD\nCLIP Suspense Strings Sound Effect Free Sound Clips Scary Halloween Sounds\nSEAN RAMESWARAM host Something strange is happening in Hollywood \nCLIP Mean Girls Trailer \nPrincipal Oh hell no\nSEAN Im not talking about that guy they got to host the Golden Globes\nCLIP Page Six Jo Koy bombs at the Golden Globes\nKoy Yo I got the gig ten days ago\nSEAN Im talking about the secret musicals\nCLIP Mean Girls Trailer \nmontage of voice blended together \nRegina You could be really hot if you changed everything \nSCORING IN Olivia Rodrigo get him back\nSEAN A new Mean Girls movie comes out today It promises it is Not Your Mothers Mean Girls which rude But also what does that mean The trailer never tells you but check out this footage from a recent screening \nSCORING OUT\nCLIP TikTok user\nCady Heron begins singing Stupid with Love\nCrowd Groans\nSCORING IN Stupid with Love Mean Girls\nSEAN That audience groaning when not Lindsay Lohan Cady Heron starts singing Theyre bummed because they didnt want a musical They didnt necessarily know they were getting a musical But they got a musical And its not just Mean Girls Why Hollywood is hiding its musicals coming up on Today ExplainedTHEME\nSEAN Ben Lindbergh is a senior editor at The Ringer where he recently wrote a piece of investigative journalism about the American film industry\nBEN LINDBERGH EDITOR THE RINGER Yes there is a cover up occurring \nSCORING IN KPMKPMLPBMoodyMinorAPM\nBEN Hollywood is hiding its musicals \nNOAM HASSENFELD host Unexplainable singing Theyre not telling anyone \nBEN The actual music has been absent from trailers for some of the most prominent movie musicals of the past year \nNOAM Hollywood is hiding the actors who are singing \nBEN I think the main ones that people have taken note of was Wonka \nNOAM Willy \nBEN Mean Girls\nNOAM Regina BEN Also to some extent The Color Purple\nNOAM Celie BEN At least in its initial trailer These are all very much movie musicals They do not hide the music once you are in the theater \nNOAM Ill be singing BEN But the trailers for these films really obscured the fact that there was music in the movies themselves Which started some conversation among some people who were in the know As word of mouth went around hey you know this is a musical rightNOAM Whoever is producing why you hiding my singing \nBEN I think people kind of did a double take I did not know that I saw the trailer Nothing in the trailer told me that these are musicals \nNOAM I wanna sing I wanna sing YeahBEN So theres been multiple rounds I think of people coming across this secret hidden knowledge that these are actually movie musicals\nNOAM Let me sing it cuz I am a star Yeah \nSCORING OUT\nSEAN And I too saw all the initial trailers for those three offending movies you mentioned So lets just go through them one by one and tell people if you watched these trailers what you would see or what you would think starting with Wonka \nBEN Just about no music as I recall There were multiple trailers but really no sign whatsoever other than Hugh Grants Oompa Loompa maybe singing in the second one \nCLIP WONKA Official Trailer\nWonka An Oompa what now\nOompa Loompa Allow me to refresh your memory flute plays\nWonka Oh I dont think I wanna hear that\nBEN And you know you would think that if youve seen the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or even the remake you know that Theres some music in a Willy Wonka movie \nCLIP Pure Imagination Willy Wonka the Chocolate Factory\nBEN But they are doing their best to hide that here And the movie doesnt hide it you know You know basically as soon as the movie starts okay theres going to be singing in this thing\nCLIP Pure Imagination WONKA\nBEN But from the trailer you really would not be able to guess that whatsoever The baseball writer Craig Calcaterra in his newsletter wrote about my piece because he went to see Wonka and in his theater there was a man who as soon as Chalamet opened his mouth to sing the first song just let out an audible Oh no\nCLIP WONKA Official Trailer\nWonka Oh I dont think I wanna hear that \nSEAN laughs\nBEN Which just goes to show that there really are people out there in the wild who do not know that these are movie musicals and in some cases may be disappointed So I suppose that backs up the strategy \nSEAN Okay next up lets talk about The Color Purple which I believe was based not only on the original source material but also on the Broadway musical of The Color Purple right \nBEN Thats right Very successful Broadway musical with multiple runs And the first trailer for The Color Purple Promised that it would be a bold new take on the beloved classic but did not specify what made it bold or what made it new SEAN laughs \nBEN which is the fact that its a musical a successful musical Youd think that theyd want to play that up\nSEAN So theyre basically telling you Were doing the musical without saying Were doing the musical\nBEN Right In fact the trailer mentions that its based on the novel but it does not mention that its adapted from a Tonywinning Broadway play which seems like something you would want to brag about\nCLIP The Color Purple Official Trailer\nTaraji P Henson Oooh Sweet loving god\nFantasia Barrino And Im here Yea sing\nSEAN And lastly because it comes out today lets close out this trend with the new Mean Girls movie which Im sure a lot of people are wondering why there is a new Mean Girls movie\nBEN Yes \nCLIP Mean Girl ScenesQuotes \nGretchen That is so fetch\nRegina Gretchen stop trying to make fetch happen Its not going to happen \nBEN One reason why theres a new Mean Girls movie is its a musical which again you would not know and probably would not even suspect from the trailer \nCLIP Mean Girls Trailer \ncrowd screams\nGretchen Wieners Why are you dressed so scary \nCady Heron Its Halloween\nGretchen Cady if you dont dress slutty that is slut shaming us\nOther Character Thats just unprofessional\nBEN Now I think theres sort of a tell which is that if you went to the theater to see Taylor Swifts Eras Tour movie there is a special theatrical trailer for Mean Girls which did highlight the fact that its a musical\nCLIP Mean Girls Teaser Trailer Taylor Swift The Eras Tour Version\nBEN So if youre in the theater to see something with music then they will disclose that theres music in this movie But if not if youre not already in that audience then theyre just not going to tell you And you will just wonder why are they remaking this thing Its not even that old And you will just be in the dark until someone lets you know or you go see it\nCLIP Rock\nJenna Well the NY City Critics association just sent me this Best Actress in a Movie Based on a Musical Based on a Movie\nLiz Hey Thats great \nSEAN And why Ben Why are they doing this\nBEN Musicals have not done well lately\nSCORING IN KPMKPMEastsideStoryBAPM\nBEN They have not made much money in theaters And they have not garnered great audiences on streaming Now you dont have to go into the distant past to find very successful movie musicals whether its La La Land or The Greatest Showman\nNOAM singing They didnt try to hide me \nBEN These are award winning and nominated movies And movies that made a lot of money ultimately Or Hamilton of course which was an enormous streaming sensation when it came out on Disney\nNOAM Disney wont you love me again\nBEN But since then things have changed And in fact the industry really invested in movie musicals postHamilton There was sort of a production boom inspired perhaps by HamiltonNOAM This is when I get sad BEN But almost everything that has surfaced since has flopped to some extent And so theres been a quick correction here as Hollywood has pivoted to Wait Maybe people dont want to see movie musicals or at least they dont want to be told that theyre about to see a movie musical And so I think thats whats driving this trend\nNOAM I know when Im not wanted\nSCORING OUT\nSEAN Who are the floppers Who are the main offenders here\nBEN So some of the more prominent ones would be West Side Story by Steven Spielberg \nCLIP West Side Story America\nBEN Or LinManuel Mirandas In the Heights\nCLIP In The Heights In the Heights\nBEN There are others that are a little less prominent Dear Evan Hansen\nCLIP You Will Be Found Dear Evan Hansen\nBEN Everybodys Talking about Jamie\nCLIP Prime Video And You Dont Even Know It Everybodys Talking About Jamie\nBEN Not enough people were talking about Jamie as it turned out SEAN laughs BEN Of course there was Cats the prepandemic notable movie musical bomb\nCLIP Jennifer Hudson Memory Cats\nBEN And then there were a bunch of movies that came out maybe on streaming and just didnt do well based on what we can tell from streaming charts \nCLIP Tick Tick BOOM Louder Than Words\nBEN Tick Tick Boom and A Week Away and Diana The Musical all on Netflix or Annette on Prime Video\nCLIP Annette We Love Each Other So Much\nBEN Or Come from Away and High School Musical The Musical The Series another mouthful with are on Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus respectively \nANNETTE OUT\nBEN So a lot of these just seem to be misses Again maybe the market was oversaturated Maybe they overinvested in the wake of Hamilton Its kind of a copycat industry But most of these movies just failed to break through Granted of course there was the pandemic which certainly hurt the movies that were released in theaters but even the ones that have come out since or that came out on streaming only just havent done well lately\nSEAN Do we think Wonka and Mean Girls and The Color Purple which were both based on the Broadway musicals of those stories were greenlit in this era this postHamilton era where everyone was drunk on musicals\nBEN It could be partly that I think in some of these cases though these are based on established IP right So you might wonder well if theyre going out of their way to hide the fact that these are musicals why are they even making musicals right\nSEAN Exactly It feels like a paradox BEN Yes\nSEAN Like you could like nip this in the bud by just not greenlighting musicals \nBEN Exactly And we might not see as many movie musicals made in the near future but these are based on established properties right People know Wonka They know Mean Girls They know The Color Purple in one incarnation or another And just as in any genre its easier to get things greenlit these days when you can point to this is a recognizable brand or this previous version of this thing made X amount of money right So I think these are sort of exceptions in a sense And maybe what is going away or what will go away is the less recognizable movie musical SEAN Mmm\nBEN the one that doesnt have some established source material \nSCORING IN SCORSCOREBroadwayLegacyAPM\nBEN I talked to a lot of movie marketing people and trailer production people And they said that the goal of the trailer is just to get people in the seats There are some people who would be attracted by a trailer that makes it explicit this is a movie musical but there are maybe more people who would be repelled by that or at least would not think that they want to see a movie musical And so the best thing to do the studios have concluded for now is just to omit that fact right So as not to turn anyone off And so they hope that if you are a movie musical fan youll find out some other way that its a movie musical and youll show up And if youre not then yeah you know theyre trying to trick you in hopefully not the most nefarious way But theyre trying to get you to go see the movie by any means necessary\nSCORING BUMP\nNOAM singing But why do they hate me Stay tuned youll see\nBREAK\nCLIP good morning baltimore hairspray\nTRACY Oh oh oh woke up today \nCLIP Hady Mawajdeh producer Explained\nSEAN Lets talk about people who hate musicals Why do people hate musicals\nSTEVEN COHAN AUTHOR PROFESSOR EMERITUS SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY I dont know if hate is the right word\nSEAN Ohhhhhhh Professor hate is the right word laughs \nSCORING IN The Trolley Song Meet Me In St Louis\nSTEVEN I just think they are not drawn to musicals And I think that musicals have lost their connection to popular culture particularly popular music in the s and s during the Depression and World War II Musicals were extremely popular and studios made many of them and they were one of the main ways along with radio that popular music was disseminated so lots of hit songs came from musicals big bands were featured in musicals popular dances were featured in musicals And with the s and the advent of rock and roll that began to shift\nSCORING OUT\nCLIP Chubby Checker The Twist\nSEAN Steven Cohan is a professor emeritus at Syracuse University Hes written multiple books about movies musicals and movie musicals Hes the kind guy when youre like whats up with this new trend Hollywoods hiding its musicals hell be all\nSTEVEN Its not new Its been going on since I think \nSEAN Huh\nSTEVEN I know Sweeney Todd disguised the fact that it was musicals but if you I dont think The Greatest Showman advertised that it was a musical If you look at trailers for um musicals I dont think many of them if at any uh advertise that theyre musicals Studios advertise to their desired demographic And just because the studios think people dont like musicals dont mean that people dont like musicals I do think that there are certain gender divisions Now Im going to make a simplification When I would teach the musical the majority of students in my class tended to be women and then thered be a handful of guys And they all love musicals Some of it was because of Broadway And some of it had to do with familial associations because of watching musicals with a grandparent or events like watching The Sound of Music for a slightly older generation when it would air on TV with a as a family event And I think associations from childhood can be very powerful in terms of peoples tastes So I think its fair to say that the studios think that people dont like musicals The other thing is that a convention of trailers these days Is to give as much of the plot as they can\nSEAN Yep \nSTEVEN Songs are harder to excerpt in a way that indicates a plot When musicals were a mainstay of studio production and so a studio like MGM or Fox were were churning out eight or nine musicals a year in the s they would advertise the number of new songs the various performers and they would have little clips of performances They were not interested or focused on advertising a narrative But these days the trailers advertise the narrative And so I think theres that industrial reason just the convention of a trailer But I agree I think that the studios think that audiences will not rush to see a musical\nSEAN And and why do you think that is\nSTEVEN I think theres probably many reasons people arent used to watching musicals They are not accustomed to the break in the illusionism of a musical SEAN Mmm\nSTEVEN when someone will burst into song and you hear an orchestra Whereas when musicals were produced in large numbers audiences were used to and accepted a break from the illusionism of the narrative and the heightened sensibility the heightened utopian experience of watching someone dance in the streets or sing their heart out I also think there is a lingering association of musicals with a queer following \nCLIP Keep it Gay The Producers\nSTEVEN so that it makes some people uncomfortable But I think the main reason has to do with just not knowing how to watch a musical \nSEAN Does it break your heart a little bit that audiences have fallen out of practice with musicals\nSTEVEN Uh I think it used to but not anymore \nSEAN Hm\nSTEVEN laughs I mean for one reason I have a lot of musicals on Bluray SEAN laughsSTEVEN So I can still watch them \nSEAN You know I think you and I may not see eye to eye on the haters out there but I do feel like in my personal experience I have heard many a friend and acquaintance say Oh I dont want to go see that I hate musicals But But I will agree with you that I dont think that person necessarily hates musicals I think that person has maybe seen a character jump into song and roll their eyes and said \nCLIP Wonka Trailer\nWonka Oh I dont think I wanna hear that\nSEAN What would you say to them to maybe help change their mind \nSTEVEN Id say go see Aquaman\nSEAN Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haSTEVEN also laughs\nCLIP LHUGUENY AQUAMAN THE MUSICAL\nMy dads from the land my moms from the sea I am Atlantis true king \nSTEVEN Okay laughs Um I know I I know that I I know the kind of a viewer youre talking about And if youre going to talk about people hating musicals then theres something really profoundly disturbing about the musical As a I think thats much much more deep seated and psychological than simply um than than simply not accepting someone bursting into song I mean I Ive taught musicals to uh in in general and in introduction courses and also in courses on the musical And Ive seen students laugh uncomfortably when someone bursts into song because theyre not used to it And its unexpected But I think that when someone says I hate musicals its because of what a musical represents to them that is so disturbing Thats why I think that that theres still a lingering association of otherness with musicals\nSEAN So this is interesting It sounds like youre saying at the heart of this matter is people might think oh musicals are kind of queer Thats not me Musicals are about white people Thats not me Is there a musical out there that sort of transcends those stigmas maybe uh and can be sort of enjoyed by one and all\nSTEVEN I think if anything it would be the musical the film version of Hairspray \nSCORING IN You Cant Stop the Beat hairspray\nSTEVEN It had a multiracial cast It was about popular music It had drag Its well done It had people of size It defied authority It was antiauthority \nSEAN The film version of Hairspray Thats the one where like John John Travolta and Christopher Walken they like slow dance on the rooftop and its movie magic \nSTEVEN Yeah And Michelle Pfeiffer \nSEAN Queen Latifah \nSTEVEN Thats right Its derived from John Waters Hairspray which is a really good film Thats a musical and both of them are about the advent of rock and roll as youth music in the s and the integration of what was uh sort of pseudo version of American Bandstand \nSCORING BUMP\nSEAN Professor Steven Cohan You might remember him from Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties Hollywood Musicals The Film Reader Incongruous Entertainment Camp Cultural Value and the MGM Musical or The Sound of Musicals Hady Mawajdeh was the star of this production The supporting cast includes Matthew Collette Laura Bullard and Rob Byers Noam Hassenfeld played The Musical The rest of the ensemble includes Noel King Amina AlSadi Avishay Artsy Victoria Chamberlin Amanda Lewellyn Miles Bryan Haleema Shah and Patrick Boyd Miranda Kennedys our executive producer We did not use any music by Breakmaster Cylinder but sometimes we do Today Explained is distributed by WNYC This show is a part of Vox which is totally free thanks in part to contributions from our listeners Join us at voxcomgive We are off Monday for Martin Luther King Jr Day Its a day of service Do something nice for somebody More Today Explained on Tuesday \n SECONDS OF SILENCE
3 Tuesday January Iowa Caucused \nHALF SECOND OF SILENCE\nBILLBOARD\nSCORING IN \nNOEL The Iowa Caucuses are over The top four votegetters are making moves\nNOEL Vivek Ramaswamy is out of the race\nCLIP Vivek Ramaswamy We did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight\nNOEL Nikki Haley on her way to New Hampshire with a third place finish \nCLIP Nikki Haley and God is so good\nNOEL Governor Ron DeSantis and the chip on his shoulder are heading straight to South Carolina \nCLIP RON DESANTIS They the media was against us they were writing our obituary months ago \nNOEL His real obituary may someday note he came SECOND in Iowa He got about percent of Iowas votes to Donald Trumps ish \nNOEL And the winner Donald Trump is back in court today So a jury can decide how much money he has to pay for defaming a writer he sexually abused \nNOEL Iowa has spoken This is what we want Iowa said loudly \nNOEL Coming up on Today Explained \nCLIP FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP if youre sick as a dog you say darling weve got to make it even if you vote and then pass away its worth it\nTHEME\nNOEL Jonathan Martin is a political columnist for Politico he has been in Iowa this election season covering the primary Something hes done every presidential election since \nJONATHAN This was by far the coldest and the least dramatic \nNOEL laughs The coldest the least dramatic Whats the headline this morning Whats the Whats the big takeaway for you \nJONATHAN Its still Trumps party \nNOEL Good good Short headline Uh you spent time talking to people on the ground Um sometimes this can be illuminating sometimes not What did you hear when you talked to voters that you thought was telling or interesting \nJONATHAN Well thats why it was worthwhile to be there the week before because um it was extraordinarily telling I went to a couple of Nikki Haley events and what it revealed was that she and Ron DeSantis are effectively competing against each other for what I call the sort of stub of the preTrump Republican Party that is still willing to participate in Republican contests now some of them arent even Republicans anymore Some of them have become Democrats Some of them have become independents but theyre still eager enough to uh try to save the soul if you will uh of what was their party or in some cases still and tenuously is their party But what we saw from the results was that the majority of the Republican Party still wants Donald Trump Um and thats been clear in surveys throughout but this is the first live action This is the first time weve seen actual Republican voters in practice And they overwhelmingly supported the former president \nCLIP PHIL MATTINGLY Trump finished the Republican caucuses with a one with a historic of the vote Youre looking at it right here Significantly more than Ron Desantis or Nikki Haley combined\nCLIP DONALD TRUMP Well I want to thank everybody this has been some period of time and most importantly we want to thank the great people of Iowa cheers \nAnd heres the tricky part about winning the Republican nomination You have to win Republican votes Um and so you know Nikki Haley uh obviously is confident about her prospects in New Hampshire And we can talk more about that in a second But her challenge going forward is going to be that you know Trump has got a lock on what is todays Republican Party which is much more heavily downscale working class Uh and you know her voters are mostly college educated and upscale and thats just not a fair fight\nNOEL Lets talk about the fight that was presumed to be fair at least six months ago Ron DeSantis \nJONATHAN Yeah \nNOEL Ron DeSantis was going up against Trump whos looking strong for a while And then in Iowa he really went all in He visited every county \nCLIP GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS I remember uh Governor Reynolds telling me early on you got to do all Like thats the people that do that are the ones that win Iowa But its also just an important tradition Talk to real Americans Listen to real Americans \nNOEL And yet last night results show he barely broke What didnt work for Ron DeSantis Or did Ron DeSantis just not work for Iowans \nJONATHAN Both\nSCORING IN A Spiral Staircase\nJONATHAN Look he had a ton of hype at the end of He was one of the few good news stories for the GOP And I think for a time he and the people who are eager to move past Trump in the GOP thought whoa weve seen this movie before Big state governor who has a good election on an otherwise tough uh tough cycle for our party and can unify the wings of our party going in to a presidential cycle This feels like George W Bush going into \nCLIP FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH into clip Its time for people to vote here Iowa in less than days The people of this great state are going to start the process to determine who is going to be the nominee of the Republican party Its the process that I like to say is the beginning of the end of the Clinton era in Washington DC \nWell it couldnt have demonstrated in couldnt have demonstrated just how much the party has changed anymore in the two decades plus since Ron DeSantis turned out to be uh a dud of a candidate Now he put a lot of work in a lot of sweat equity into Iowa He won some key endorsements but ultimately he was effectively challenging a de facto incumbent in in Donald Trump Um and the other challenge was that once Nikki Haley came on in the fall with a series of good debate performances you know she locked in a lot of what I was saying earlier kind of the pre Trump Republicans insert the this was squeezed right He he wasnt getting the Trump people and he was losing uh the kind of old guard types who would left the party And so he didnt have much to show for it \nScoring out A Spiral Staircase\nNOEL Nikki Haley comes in right behind DeSantis but still right behind DeSantis is third place Last week we talked about how well Haley appeared to be doing in some polls Where do the results from Iowa leave her going into the New Hampshire primary \nJONATHAN Uh not very well Look she was hoping to ride the momentum from her debate showings The buzz she had picked up the surge of financial support This pining among a lot of again the old guard of the party for anybody but Trump And then they see her head to head Numbers against Biden in a trial heat general election and shes winning overwhelmingly And so for a lot of Republicans who are embarrassed by Trump and just want to find somebody that can be the nominee and defeat Biden Wow I mean this is somebody whos compelling right And so I think she didnt have much organization You smartly pointed out that DeSantis had done counties in Iowa She hadnt done that and she concentrated instead on where ultimately most of her voters were the cities and high income suburbs in Iowa But ultimately uh it was too little too late and there just werent enough of those folks uh to to give her a good showing especially given that she was competing with DeSantis for that very antiTrump voter in a lot of cases \nNOEL Jonathan in a state with more of those folks though might Nikki Haley have a much better showing Might she be proving something if Iowa wasnt quite Iowa \nJONATHAN Well thats precisely why shes optimistic going into New Hampshire But its also why New Hampshire could pose what I wrote last week is something of a false dawn \nSCORING IN Richard Goes Skating\nUm because New Hampshire is an outlier when it comes to the Republican nominee process We saw that speaking in We saw this in where where John McCain won and there was a moment where is Bush really in trouble \nCLIP FORMER SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN My friends a wonderful New Hampshire campaign has come to an end but a great national crusade has just begun cheers \nWell no New Hampshire is overwhelmingly compared to other states high income secular educated When the rest of the party is the opposite of those things And you add to that the fact that as youre going to hear a zillion times in the next week independents can vote in New Hampshire And when theres no major action in the other party and theres really not that much this year on the Democratic side a lot of those independents go play in the Republican primary And so yes Nikki Haley is going to go to New Hampshire and shes going to find a lot more of the kind of voters that she was trying to win in Iowa \nCLIP FORMER UN AMB NIKKI HALEY Tonight I will be back in the great state of New Hampshire And the question before Americans is now very clear Do you want more of the same or do you want a new generation of conservative leadership cheers \nAnd I expect her to be much more competitive in New Hampshire But to what end To what And to because where did she go from there \nSuggestion scoring out Richard Goes Skating\nNOEL Okay so it sounds like the takeaway is nothing guaranteed for Haley Anything else in New Hampshire worth looking out for Does the broader electorate do the people watching Do we need to care how Ron DeSantis does in New Hampshire \nJONATHAN I think DeSantis matters in New Hampshire mostly as uh is he taking votes from Trump or from Haley And I think thats where DeSantis uh could be a factor here in New Hampshire Um its totally possible that you know he sits on votes that Nikki Haley otherwise needs in Is she losing to Trump there by nine or by two Um thats a totally plausible scenario especially if DeSantis is in the race and taking votes Um and her choice as to whether or not to go on the South Carolina I can assure you is going to be shaped in part by whatever the margin is there Now if she wins New Hampshire DeSantis or no DeSantis I think she almost certainly goes on to South Carolina But if she loses there to Trump I think the margin does shape her decision going forward \nSCORING IN sad little skulls\nNOEL Politicos Jonathan Martin Coming up what happened to Teflon Ron The rise and fall and fall of Ron DeSantis \nBREAK\nBUMPER\nCLIP RON DESANTIS Weve got our ticket punched out of Iowa CHEERS\nZACK Im Zach Beauchamp I am a senior correspondent at Vox uh where I cover uh democracy in the United States and abroad in the far right And I have a forthcoming book titled The Reactionary Spirit which covers the rise of right wing antidemocratic politics around the world\nNOEL So Zack Ron DeSantis came in second in Iowa You remember the old line Second place is the first loser Uh is this the end of the line for Ron DeSantis\nZACK Unequivocally yes Yes DeSantis invested huge amounts of resources in Iowa He moved something like a third of his campaign staff there invested tremendous amount of money The candidate visited all counties inside Iowa The basic idea was that DeSantis was going to win the conservative lane right that he was the true conservative in the race Thats the person who tends to do well in Iowa typically social conservatives which is the DeSantis shtick of a kind Uh and so he thought that maybe a surprise win here or at least a strong performance could get him within striking distance of Donald Trump It turned into a two person race Except that not what happened He got blown out by like something points uh barely ahead of Nikki Haley who was never considered a serious candidate in Iowa Uh and DeSantis is negligible in New Hampshire He doesnt look like a force in South Carolina Uh theres theres just no other way to say it right His donors are fleeing Hes done DeSantis is done Hes not quitting yet But theres theres no chance that he wins\nNOEL What on earth happened\nZACK So I mean look its important to start the story really in November right \nSCORING INStacking ladders\nThats when Ron DeSantis was riding really high because Trump backed candidates had performed really really poorly in the midterms \nCLIP VOA NEWS Democrat John Fetterman claimed victory in a tight race over celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz who was backed by Donald TrumpNew Hampshire Democratic Senator Maggie Hasan fought off a challenge from Trump backed Don Bolduc \nZACK it probably cost Republicans the Senate These really really strange and off putting candidates that Trump had endorsed Um they lost Republicans the Senate So that looked bad for him Uh and DeSantis had just won Florida which as we all know has been a purple state until recently by a really decisive margin\nCLIP TAMPA BAY NEWS We usually see very tight races for Governor here in Florida you remember back in with Andrew Gillum just how lose it was but look at the spread here tonight to to Democratic challenge Charlie Christ \nZACK So the core of his argument for the next few months sort of implicit he didnt really take shots at Trump which is part of the problem But implicit was Im a winner and Trump is a loser Ill carry on his kind of politics but Ill do it while I beat Democrats at the same time Um and a lot of people in the Republican elite thought that would be persuasive They really did The problem is they underestimated Once again I dont know how people keep doing this They underestimated Donald Trumps hold on the Republican base It just it boggles my mind that professional politicians and political operatives keep doing this after all the evidence we have for eight years But that like in a nutshell thats what happened\nSCORING SPUTTERS OUT\nNOEL Lets actually talk about this numerically first What were the numbers showing us when Ron DeSantis was really doing well How close was he to Trump\nZACK It was closeer but not actually close Huh Right DeSantis His peak was sometime around January February Like a year ago Uh and he peaked at points below Trump in the Real Clear Politics average Like in a normal primary if the runner up is down points nobody considers that an especially competitive race Right But thats thats sort of the wishful thinking was that everyone else would melt away and youd have a DeSantis Trump race where DeSantis managed to consolidate all of the people who didnt want to vote for Trump Uh thats not what happened though Uh and really you can trace the beginning of the end for DeSantis to the start of Trumps indictments Uh DeSantis himself suggested this by the way\nCLIP GOV DESANTIS Ive criticized the cases but I also think it distorted the primary And its been those are kind of the main issues that have happened \nJAKE TAPPER Because its helped him Is that what you are saying \nGOV DESANTIS Both that but then it also just crowded out so much other stuff\nNOEL Remind me remind me because its been a long year and a half When did Trumps indictments start and why did that signal the end for DeSantis\nZACK So the first Trump indictment was on March th And in the next week or so DeSantis deficit with Trump roughly doubled from around the ish maybe to uh something in the high s right And maybe a little bit over a week So were talking really rapid the kind of thing that suggests that the event really did matter Read the indictment And it wasnt just like something else was going on Um so why did this matter Right It mattered because it exposed the flawed premise at the heart of the DeSantis campaign which is basically this Ron DeSantis was campaigning on the idea that he was basically Trump but smarter Trump a more effective Trump a more competent Trump but a winner right The problem is why would any voter opt for Trumpbut when they could have actual Donald Trump the things that were appealing about like real on brand Trump were not Just that he beat Democrats Its that he had this whole set of grievances that he was able to mobilize and tap into and a sense of identity that he could speak to in a really deep way in his voters that DeSantis couldnt replicate Um and he knew that Trump was very favorably regarded by most people in the Republican base He knew that the majority of Republican voters in poll after poll believed Trumps lies about the election So DeSantis didnt challenge the premise of Trumps candidacy which was you need me to win to avenge the defeat in or rather the stolen election in Uh he couldnt attack that right He couldnt And he couldnt do that He had to like go along with this Trump script of the deep state being biased against him and so on Uh so when the indictments hit right the rubber hits the road DeSantis if he was had like a real challenge to Trump would need to say look he just got indicted This guy cant be our standard bearer He might be in jail by the time the general election rolls around But instead of being able to say that outright he defended Trump against the indictment in a competitive primary\nCLIP RON DESANTIS MARCH That is when you know the law has been weaponized for political purposes that is when you know the left is using the law to target their political opponents \nZACK And again that was true in all the indictments like the first indictment in New York is legally the most iffy So I can sort of see questioning that indictment But on down the road some of them are really ironclad and some of them are really serious Right And DeSantis is throughout the entire indictment period just defending Trump defending Trump defending Trump uh and saying the deep state is biased against him doing this kind of weird performative thing where he says\nCLIP MSNBC Florida quote will not assist in an extradition request give the questionable circumstances at issue with this SOROS backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda \nZACK Which like come on man Right Like none of that is going to happen And all of this is just saying youre just confirming Trumps narrative Youre saying hes right about everything Hes the real victim Hes the hes the big centerpiece of American politics And everything revolves around Donald Trump And his grievances with the American political and legal system And once you concede that premise Right Whats even the point of campaigning Right Why Like youre going youre not going to beat the guy who youre basically saying Im his sidekick\nNOEL So DeSantis made a bet that he could separate Trumpism from Donald Trump He could be Trumpy but without Trumps problems And it didnt work What does that tell us about the rest of this primary season\nZACK Well at one point uh I described the contrast between Trump and DeSantis as being between the ID of conservative populism and the ego of conservative populism Right One is just wild willing to cause chaos to assail institutions willy nilly in the most dramatic ways Whereas DeSantis style uh far right politics was methodical It was rather it was comparatively less bombastic It was legalistic Uh and whats clear is that the majority of the Republican base preferred the bombast They prefer the conflict They dont have the patience for this kind of quiet stuff or the appreciation for it\nNOEL Lets bring it back at the end to Ron DeSantis He is still the governor of Florida Its still a big job He wanted to be bigger and that didnt work So what happens to Ron DeSantissees his national political career now Does he have one Is it over\nZACK Thats really hard to say I think DeSantis has done immense damage to his national aspirations Immense \nSCORING INDAMN YEAH SHEBEASTS\nThe question is whether its recoverable And that depends a lot on events that are really outside anyones ability to predict For example first and foremost how long does Donald Trump live Does Donald Trumps criminal trial seriously affect his ability to compete in the presidential presidential election With the Trump show theres so many unpredictable events that could take place that some of them could end up rehabilitating DeSantis down the line or vindicating certain elements of his critique What we can say with real confidence is that Ron DeSantis has done tremendous damage to himself and if he wants to be a national political figure going forward he needs to do something that can rehabilitate his image and that can address the flaws the sort of media narrative of him being a kind of incompetent campaigner who doesnt mesh well with with actual voters like he needs to do something to fix that And I just dont know what it is that he will do or what he can do\nSCORING BUMP\nNOEL Voxs Zach Beachum Zach thank you so much for taking the time for us We really appreciate it\nZAK Thanks a lot \nNOEL Todays show was produced by Miles Bryan and Isabel Angell Amina alSadi edited Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers engineered Laura Bullard factchecked with an assist from Victoria Chamberlin Im Noel King Its Today Explained\n SECONDS OF SILENCE
4 January Cocaine problems\nHALF SECOND OF SILENCE\nBILLBOARD\nNOEL KING host Everyone is worried about Ecuador right now Europe is worried because cocaine from Ecuador is reaching European ports in record amounts \nSCORING IN Decision point b APM\nCLIP BBC Cocaine thats getting through the ports of Antwerp is now flooding the rest of Europe\nNOEL The US is worried about Ecuador because violence from that cocaine trade is sending Ecuadorians fleeing our way \nWILL FREEMAN fellow Council on Foreign Relations Just in fiscal year I believe Ecuadorians uh arrived at the USMexico border Uh so thats a huge number relative to the scale of the country\nNOEL And Ecuador is profoundly worried about Ecuador as drug gangs fight for control of ports streets and prisons and officials openly speculate that the countrys become a narcostate\nWILL At the time I wondered if they were speaking in hyperbole but I think the events of the last uh few months and the last couple of weeks have shown that they werent \nNOEL On Today Explained the worlds most urgent cocaine problem \nSCORING OUT Decision point b APM\nTHEME\nNOEL Ana Lankes is The Economists woman in Brazil Shes been writing about Ecuador a country very on edge after the events of last week \nANA LANKES correspondent The Economist Last week Ecuador was totally engulfed in chaos caused by drug trafficking gangs\nSCORING IN Progressive momentum a APM\nANA On January th prison guards discovered that the leader of a very powerful gang was not in his cell\nCLIP AL JAZEERAALESSANDRO RAMPIETTI CORRESPONDENT This is José Adolfo Macías better known as Fito the leader of the powerful Los Choneros gang in Ecuador He was serving a long sentence for murder drug trafficking and organized crime in this maximum security prison in the port city of Guayaquil But on Sunday when soldiers raided the facility as part of a government crackdown authorities said he was nowhere to be found\nANA And when news of his escape spread and a nationwide manhunt was called gang members in prisons across the country basically began rioting and taking prison guards hostage So the next day Ecuadors new president Daniel Naboa declared a state of emergency for days to retake control of the prisons\nCLIP BBC NEWSMIMI SWABY JOURNALIST Now this signing of the decree has basically allowed the authorities to carry out search and rescue operations in this manhunt to try and find Ecuadors most dangerous and most wanted criminal\nANA And thats when gangsters started fighting back on the streets So they did things like detonate bombs They burned cars they kidnaped policemen And some really shocking images were that a group of gangsters seized control of a television station in the middle of a live broadcast and another armed group raided a university And thats when the president declared an internal armed conflict And hes ordered the army to neutralize organized crime groups including Fitos gang\nCLIP BBC NEWS\nMIMI SWABY JOURNALIST Three thousand police officers and soldiers are currently scouring Ecuador trying to find this cartel leader This is a serious security crisis and this escape of Fito is somewhat of an embarrassment for this president who only took office in November vowing to tackle gangrelated crime and this surge of violence\n SCORING OUT Progressive momentum a APM\nNOEL This attack on television was spectacular It was the kind of thing that you dont often see um live on television Can you just give us a sense of what a viewer would have been seeing if they had the TV on at that moment \nANA Yeah it was really terrifying\nCLIP ASSOCIATED PRESS Armed men storm Ecuador TV studio during live broadcast\nANA So the gunmen showed up and they showed off grenades dynamite sticks and machine guns on television and they pistol whipped staff to the floor And then they forced an anchor to say on television that the police shouldnt do anything\nCLIP BBC\nIONE WELLS CORRESPONDENT A moment of utter horror broadcast live on television Armed men with balaclavas over their faces broke into the set of this public television channel in Ecuador while it was live on air brandishing guns and what appears to be explosives\nANA So all armed gunmen were arrested And I think the point of this attack was basically for the gangs to show off just how powerful they have become and to show off their weapons So when you watch the clips thats what theyre literally doing This was on air for minutes Theyre basically displaying grenades and machine guns on camera\nCLIP CBS NEWS\nVLAD DUTHIERS ANCHOR Even the clip we showed there doesnt show the full extent of the terrifying moments when one of the gunmen pointed what looked like a shotgun at the anchors neck and told them to read whatever they wanted him to say\nANA So obviously theres shock and horror Theres also been international public support So the US government has promised to send military State Department and law enforcement officials to Ecuador in the coming weeks And theres also been regional repercussions So Peru uh which shares a border with Ecuador also called a state of emergency on its northern border\nNOEL The president Daniel Noboa you said declares an internal armed conflict What does that mean What does that force his government to do or require his government to do \nANA It basically means that the army is going to go on to the streets and into prisons and that they have a much stronger kind of legal protection to go after these organized crime groups But he has said that they have to follow kind of the rules of international humanitarian law\nCLIP DW\nNICOLE RIS LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT Noboa in his declaration also said that he wants to in his words neutralize more than of the criminal gangs in the country He only took office in November so this is his first really severe security crisis \nNOEL Whats been the result of that declaration \nANA So in the past week over people have been arrested and all the hostages that were seized during the prison riots there were over of them have been freed But there are fears that this could lead to a spiral of escalating violence and strongman approaches in the rest of Latin America have not usually worked They have worked in some cases but they havent usually worked So that is a legitimate fear\nNOEL Alright lets pull back a little bit from the violence that happened So Ecuador is located between Colombia and Peru This is a part of the world that has dealt with drug wars that has dealt with the drug trade Is this time different for Ecuador though \nANA So Ill start with a really striking statistic In Ecuador was one of the safest countries in Latin America It had a homicide rate that was basically the same as the US but last year Ecuadors homicide rate had grown to per It grew more than six fold from And that means that Ecuador is now Latin Americas deadliest country mainland Latin America because some Caribbean countries have higher homicide rates And the violence thats been adopted is really gory It includes public hangings and decapitations and immolation of rival gang members in prisons and prisons have really been the focus of a lot of this violence So since over inmates have been murdered in prison massacres And basically this is mainly happening because of cocaine \nSCORING IN Hang in the balance a APM\nANA So three things have happened in the past decade or decade and a half that have turned Ecuador into a major hub for international drug trafficking The first is that Ecuador has become a much more important hub for Peruvian and Colombian cocaine to move to Europe and the US The second reason Ecuador has descended into violence is because both the supply of and the demand for cocaine um are rising particularly in Europe So much of the cocaine in the US is shipped from Colombia But according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime gangs have established new routes from places like Ecuador and South Americas Southern Cone to Europe And then I think the third reason that Ecuador has become kind of this crime hub in South America is because bad politics has made it easier for gangs to flourish Basically there was a populist left wing president called Rafael Correa who was in power between and And in the name of antiimperialism he reduced cooperation with the DEA and he had a really bad relationship with the police And since he left power Ecuadorian politics has been consumed by the fight between his followers and his opponents And that means instead of focusing on you know the spiraling security crisis politicians have been very focused on elections and on getting power in Congress Meanwhile the gangs have basically just been buying off corrupt politicians and bureaucrats and this is a really big part of the story One reason Ecuadors gangs have been able to rise is because they have bought off many politicians and bureaucrats So Fito the guy we started with the kingpin who escaped from jail he escaped right before he was meant to be moved to a maximum security ward And theres no way he could have gotten that information without inside help \nSCORING OUT Hang in the balance a APM\nNOEL Okay so weve seen Ana how drug gangs have terrorized Mexico Weve seen what gangs have done in El Salvador We know that it is terrifying to live in a country in this kind of disarray And often when it gets really desperate it leads people to flee Does the Ecuadorian government have a fix for these massive massive problems \nANA There is no quick fix One of the reasons some analysts think that the prison riots happened is because Noboa came to power only just like a few weeks ago and he promised to establish two new maximum security prisons and possibly also like a floating prison off the coast of Ecuador where hed put the the worst criminals And hed also called for a referendum that would basically expand the role for the military in combating criminal organizations And it would help the state to seize assets owned by criminals and it would lead to the extradition It would legalize the extradition If the referendum is approved it would legalize the extradition of some of these kingpins So all of that has caused obviously anger among the gangs But some of these policies especially the construction of kind of maximum security jails and sending the army onto the streets they kind of ape the policy of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador And what he has done in recent years since hes thrown around of the adult population in jail for suspected links to gangs But its come at a huge cost because most people arent getting a free trial the free press has been muzzled and Bukele has used his popularity to undermine uh you know the independence of Congress and the courts So part of Noboas strategy looks a little similar to this And thats what I mean with there are some legitimate fears that this could really lead to as you know an escalation of violence in the short term and then of human rights problems in the long term\nSCORING IN Finding the issue b APM\nANA But its not entirely clear what else he can do right now So he has also you know called for the reestablishment of an antinarcotics unit in the police And I think generally the extradition of criminals and also the seizure of their assets are a good thing So I think basically right now its really hard to know what the right thing to do is And this is theres no easy solutions to this Because at the heart of the problem is rising demand for cocaine and also rising supply\nNOEL That was Ana Lankes of leading magazine The Economist Coming up a little bit about cocaine \nSCORING OUT Finding the issue b APM\nBREAK\nBUMPER\nNOEL Its Today Explained Were back Will Freeman is with me Hes a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations Hes spent some time in Ecuador talking to key players about their fears that the country is becoming a narcostate or a place where the drug trade is knit into everything Ecuador sits between Peru and Colombia Both big producers of cocaine Will says for many years it was a Colombian group the FARC that used to control the drug trade in Ecuador while its government\nWILL FREEMAN fellow Council on Foreign Relations The government for the most part stayed out of the FARCs way So there was sort of uh de facto agreement if you will to hear no evil see no evil uh look the other way And it kept things relatively stable Now all that started to change uh in when FARC demobilized as part of a peace accord with uh the Colombian state\nCLIP CNN \nPATRICK OPPMANN CORRESPONDENT After more than five decades of bloodshed there may be a chance for peace in Colombia again The Colombian government and the Marxist guerrillas known as FARC are due to sign a revised peace deal Thursday to end the conflict that has killed more than people and forced millions more Colombians from their homes \nWILL You saw a power vacuum emerge in Ecuador And the situation got much much more complicated with different groups from around Latin America and around the world swooping in to try to control this valuable piece of uh turf \nCLIP FRANCE\nYUKA ROYER CORRESPONDENT A gun battle inside the walls of a prison Not a rare occurrence in Ecuador Criminal groups from Mexico Colombia and Brazil have long battled for control inside Latin American prisons which they use to orchestrate drug trafficking and other activities on the outside\nWILL By all means from what we know it does seem that increasing volumes of cocaine are flowing over the borders especially of Colombia into Ecuador Uh last year now exPresident Guillermo Lasso uh who held office from to said his government seized the largest uh volume of cocaine ever in Ecuadors history Now on the one hand the government tried to tout that as a success But what it really shows us is that the volume of drugs is uh has never probably been greater flowing through Ecuador\nNOEL So the drugs come from Colombia and Peru and they end up in Europe Can you walk us through the journey of how they get from the initial point through Ecuador and then to their final destination What does this look like \nWILL Lets take one common route for instance from the south of Colombia from a department like Putumayo or Naranjo \nSCORING IN Decision point b APM\nCLIP AL JAZEERA\nKARL PENHAHUL CORRESPONDENT If you know where to look Its not hard to find illegal plantations of coca leaves The main ingredient of cocaine \nWILL So what youd see is uh you know farmers basically controlled by Colombian organized crime producing coca uh which in recent years uh has reached levels weve never seen before I mean an absolutely unprecedented uh volume of coca being grown produced Youre then seeing it trafficked over the border by different Colombian groups in some cases by Venezuelan groups And what youre then seeing is the drug move along transit routes in Ecuador\nCLIP AL JAZEERA\nLUCIA NEWMAN CORRESPONDENT Small fishing boats like these and homemade submarines also take Colombian cocaine north \nWILL Once the drug is actually out of these isolated rural areas in southern Colombia and on the road in Ecuador its relatively easy to move There in Ecuador youre seeing local gangs violently fight each other for supremacy in Ecuadors port cities Increasingly what these gangs and cartels are doing is smuggling uh drugs into container ships which are then uh you know just of course also carrying legal goods uh then fanned out across the entire world to ports uh like Rotterdam uh and Amsterdam in the Netherlands uh to Australia to other countries\nSCORING OUT Decision point b APM\nWILL And uh just by a twist of fate making this all the more complicated bananas are one of Ecuadors largest exports Thats a lot of whats being shipped through some of these ports And of course you need to move those containers quickly Bananas will rot \nCLIP AL JAZEERA\nLUCIA NEWMAN CORRESPONDENT Luscious tropical fruits especially bananas are exported from Guayaquils Pacific ports to Europe Asia and Russia So far this year more than tons of cocaine have been confiscated in cargo \nWILL So uh youre dealing with a situation where uh containers are constantly being loaded on and off ships There is very little in the way of infrastructure to screen whats happening Uh despite persistent government efforts to get something installed Now from there uh these container ships lets just pick one destination Uh many of them will end up at Rotterdam one of the busiest ports in northwestern Europe and be offloading goods every week every month uh in which there is some amount of uh hidden cocaine\nCLIP EURONEWS\nREPORTER Customs officials in the Netherlands have netted the countrys largest ever haul of drugs They seized the shipment of over kg of cocaine in the port of Rotterdam on the th of July \nWILL Just last year we saw officials from EU member states Norway and Turkey seize tonnes of cocaine uh across the EU and also Europes ports Uh thats quadruple the volume of cocaine seized in So that should give you a sense of the way this problem is really escalating And uh where many of these drugs move through Ecuador ultimately end up \nNOEL It also gives us a sense if that much supply is going in presumably theres that much demand in Europe for cocaine \nWILL Yeah Thats right I mean we can just read by the signals we get from these drug seizures uh by discoveries made by European officials across the continent But it does seem that uh were seeing ever larger amounts of uh drugs bought and sold in Europe \nCLIP SKY NEWS\nCOCAINE BRITAINS OPEN SECRET On a night out we met hairdressers bar staff a teacher and medical workers who said theyve used cocaine \nSPEAKER I have done cocaine before I would say yeah it is like a fun experience and stuff but I do find like it is very regular You do get like a lot of people off right here on the streets and stuff\nNOEL Many Americans associate cocaine with these smuggling networks between the US and South and Latin America that started in I guess the s Um you know weve all seen the movies and the TV shows How did it end up that Europe is the final destination and not the United States Or is the United States also getting cocaine that comes through Ecuador \nWILL The United States is still absolutely a major consumer\nCLIP WOLF OF WALL STREET\nMARK HANNA snort\nWILL if not the largest consumer in the world of cocaine\nCLIP WOLF OF WALL STREET\nJORDAN BELFORT Mr Hanna youre able to do the drugs during the day and still function still do your job\nMARK HANNA Well how the fuck else would you do your job Cocaine and hookers my friend\nWILL But compared to the s its market share has decreased Weve seen Europe Australia uh parts of Asia start to consume more and more while at the same time weve seen Americans uh turning ever more often to fentanyl to opioids to methamphetaminesSo I think the were seeing the shift partly as Latin American and European criminal organizations which were used to being able to ship so much to the US are looking in a very entrepreneurial way if you will Uh theyre looking to see where else they can sell their product and they found a very receptive market in Europe\nNOEL All right So youve seen really unfortunate and at times devastating violence on the front end in Ecuador Is there violence on the receiving end in Europe \nWILL More than you might expect \nNOEL Huh \nWILL Because often thats not the impression we have of northwestern Europe Think about a country like the Netherlands who associates the Netherlands with uh gangland style hits on reporters and judges or the kidnapping of port officials that those are actually incidents weve seen over the last couple of years there enough to prompt the mayor of Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago in The Guardian to publish an op ed saying that shes worried about the Netherlands becoming a narco state in all seriousness So I think that this is a problem that if the EU doesnt step up and get a handle on uh you know we could see it as the source of more and more violence in that part of the world as well \nNOEL We have had in the United States as you know a long and protracted war on drugs\nWILL Mhm \nNOEL that today is widely viewed as unsuccessful Right Weve also seen strongman leaders in South and Latin America try to take on narco traffickers How does Ecuador start to combat this problem without making the mistakes that weve made for the past generation or two \nWILL First Id say lets reconceptualize this lets look at the problem as it is Id argue that thats not only as a problem of drug trafficking but as a problem of organized crime So Ecuador the rest of Latin America for that matter needs to win a war against organized crime not just drug trafficking Why do I bring it up Because these groups in Ecuador are already expanding into new illicit markets So they started off with drugs but increasingly theyre extorting legal businesses Theyre involved in illegal mining uh which is hugely profitable Some Ecuadorian officials even told me more profitable than drugs Uh and theyre involved in human smuggling and the facilitation of irregular migration through Ecuador So what can Ecuador or other countries do to start to bend the curve here uh and change the situation on the ground Well I think nothing is more important than cutting the links that have formed between criminal actors between mafias and state officials Uh nowhere in the world does organized crime grow without some measure of state protection Ecuador is no exception to that story going back years now There have been very pervasive issues of organized crime groups coopting parts of the state buying off or threatening state officials into working with them into providing them protection You know I think we also really need to see serious efforts to investigate money laundering Uh organized crime always depends on interfacing with the legal economy And often that can make it an even more difficult problem to tackle as uh licit legal above ground businesses depend on cash infusions and cash inflows from criminal actors So before that problem uh really gets to be all consuming I think Ecuador needs to take down the money launderers as well These are some of the steps uh that hopefully the Daniel Noboa government is considering \nSCORING IN Finding the issue b APM \nNOEL Todays episode was produced by Haleema Shah Matthew Collette is our editor David Herman is our engineer Laura Bullard factchecked alongside Isabel Angell Im Noel King Its Today Explained \nSCORING OUT Finding the issue b APM \n SECONDS OF SILENCE
5 January How the war in Gaza ends\nHALF SECOND OF SILENCE\nBILLBOARD\nSEAN RAMESWARAM host Its a New Year but we got the Same Wars\nSCORING Density \nSEAN Hamas and Israel have been at it for over days as of this week \nCLIP ISRAELI TRANSLATION days of hope and despair and hope again days that I enter Omars room and I tell him to be strong And I pray\nSEAN We got another deal to deliver humanitarian aid to Gazans \nCLIP CBS Qatar says it has brokered an agreement that would get medicine and aid to Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for medicine and humanitarian aid for Palestinian civilians \nSEAN And the war continues to expand\nCLIP DW Now this was the fourth day of US strikes in less than a week on Iranbacked Houthi militants whove been attacking merchant ships in the Red Sea \nSEAN But before this spins further out of control we wanted to ask how it could end\nWhat would a permanent ceasefire look like How would we get there \nWe found a guy who says he knows how this story ends \nWere gonna ask him to share on Today Explained \nTHEME\nSEAN Today Explained Sean Rameswaram joined by Professor Emeritus Ian Lustick of the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania Hes been writing and thinking about the IsraelPalestine conflict for \nIAN LUSTICK UPenn professor emeritus For years or so ever since I lived in Israel for six months in As a student then wrote my first article on What do West Bank Arabs really want back in just two years after the SixDay War And uh Ive been studying it professionally working in the government working in consulting teaching ever since \nSEAN Most recently he wrote a piece for TIME called History Tells Us How the IsraelHamas War Will End\nIAN I have really been through so many of these wars I remember the Six Day War I even remember the war The war the War of Attrition the Lebanon War in the Second Lebanon War in And one of the things that all of them have in common they dont end because Israels announced war aims have been achieved they end because a superpower orders Israel to stop So that means I was pretty certain and still am certain that this war will end not when Israels expanding list of war aims is accomplished but when the United States the reigning superpower decides to turn on the red light SEAN The professor postulates that none of this will stop until the United States says it should which might seem kinda like a head scratcher since the United States by all accounts is supporting Israel We asked him for the history here\nSCORING Neutrality a\nIAN There was a civil war first between Israel and Palestinians for many months that resulted in the displacement of many Palestinians And then Israel was created\nCLIP UN CHAIR HERBERT EVATT And I therefore formally declare Israel admitted to membership in the United Nations cheers \nIAN The British finally left and the Arab states invaded Palestine That war continued until But there was a point Israel was in Sinai It also was poised to attack and capture the West Bank In both cases the decision was not to do it because of the British threat to end the Jewish state altogether if Israel dared to attack the West Bank or did not withdraw from Sinai\nSCORING OUT \nCLIP BRITISH PATHÉ After weeks of stalemate the Suez Crisis burst dramatically into the news again for Israel has invaded Egypt duck \nIAN Israel Britain and France attacked Egypt after Egypt signed an arms agreement with the Soviet Union and nationalized the Suez Canal There was a quick war in which the British and the French were stopped were forced to withdraw because the United States and the Soviet Union ordered them to Israel was ordered out of the Sinai and out of the Gaza Strip in March by President Eisenhower \nCLIP FORMER PRESIDENT DWIGHT D EISENHOWER As it is the manifest right of any of these nations to take such decisions and actions it is likewise our right if our judgment so dictates for we do not accept the use of force in the settlement of international disputes \nIAN who told BenGurion BenGurion initially his war aim was to never leave Sinai because thats where the Jewish people were created Eisenhower told him well if you want to stay in the Sinai youre not going to get any American ships visiting a lot through the Gulf of Aqaba Those were enough to get Israel out of Gaza and out of the Sinai \nSCORING BACK IN Neutrality\nIAN In Israel was faced with threats from Arab countries to attack which seemed credible Israel preemptively attacked and destroyed the Egyptian air forces It took over the Sinai took over the West Bank and took over the Golan Heights within in five days On the sixth day the military was still fighting against Syria wanted to expand the war And the United States and the UN told Israel no you have until today to stop\nSCORING OUT \nIAN And the order was given by Defense Minister uh Dayan that even if the military commanders continued to fight they would not even get air cover \nCLIP CSPAN On the th of June Syria the last Arab holdout agreed to a ceasefire The fighting was now stopped \nCLIP FORMER PRESIDENT LYNDON B JOHNSON After three weeks of wrestling with the Middle East its a real pleasure to come home tonight to the peace and quiet of Texas politics\nCLIP BRITISH PATHÉ Israel More than two years ago there was a battle here Grim reminders of that sixday fight still lay rusting near the borders duck under \nIAN In Israel was fighting on the Canal and the Jordan River the Suez Canal a War of Attrition artillery exchanges and bombing that were taking a toll on Arab communities Arab armies but also an Israeli army And this fighting continued through and and the summer of because the Soviets put advisers in Egypt and a crisis was brewing between the United States and the Soviet Union over this the United States put tremendous pressure on Israel in the summer of and Israel finally agreed to to the resolution that the other countries had agreed to after the SixDay War that said that Israel would withdraw from territories captured in as part of a peace agreement Israel had refused to accept that because part of its coalition wouldnt go along with it Under American pressure Menachem Begins party the right wing party left the coalition and Israel made peace and the War of Attrition stopped\nSCORING BACK IN Neutrality a\nCLIP NBC NEWS It is an allout war Thats how Israeli Defense Minister Moishe Dayan describes an invasion of the Golan Heights and the Suez by Syria and Egypt \nIAN In that war continued After a few weeks the Israeli army under Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal into Egypt proper into Africa and was surrounding and was about to destroy the Third Army The UN passed a ceasefire resolution the UN Security Council and that ordered Israel to stop on October nd It did not stop The United States was engaged again in it In a super duper crisis with the Soviet Union\nCLIP FORMER PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON We obtained information which led us to believe that the Soviet Union was planning to send a very substantial force into the Middle East a military force \nIAN Our nuclear missiles were put on alert yellow alert and the United States ordered Israel immediately to stop fighting and return to the lines it had held on October nd and to allow resupply of the Egyptian Third Army Thats immediately what Israel did and the war stopped\nCLIP NIXON I think I could safely say that the chances for not just a ceasefire which we presently have and which we have had in the mideast for some time but the outlook for a permanent peace is the best that it has been in years \nSCORING OUT \nIAN And we could go on with the Lebanon War The Lebanon War both of which involved ceasefire decisions by the UN or the United States and France imposed on Israel that brought about an end to the fighting Every one\nSEAN I think to some people listening this might sound sort of paradoxical because the United States is such a supporter of Israel Because the United States is in a way funding these wars even if the United States might want them to stop that it takes the United States to stop the wars in Israel that they are funding To stop this country that the United States is supporting How does that work\nIAN It works in this way And Im going to tell a story that might be odd It has to do with Cuba\nSEAN Cuba\nIAN There are two issues in international politics where the United States position is what you call in statistics three standard deviations from the norm That means completely weird One of them is Israel When you vote on settlements or you vote and on whether there should be a ceasefire in Gaza the entire General Assembly countries will vote one way The United States Samoa and Israel will vote another way SEAN Hm IAN The other issue thats like that is Cuba the UN votes to end the embargo against Cuba All countries in the UN vote against it except for the United States and Israel who vote for the boycott And thats odd on its face because Israel supposedly opposes boycotts But in this case its the United States and Israel together that did vote to boycott Cuba So what do these two questions Israel and Cuba have in common They both are the questions where there are foreign policy lobbies in the United States that are singleissue movements and have decisive political importance domestically for the president the Cuba lobby in Florida and the AIPAC the Israel lobby all over the country Those are by far the most powerful foreign policy lobbies\nSCORING Autobahn Kirche \nIAN When push comes to shove for a president its domestic politics that counts always So American foreign policy interests only carry American policy so far Its when the United States fears a regional war or a confrontation with another great power that the president can say All right domestic political costs Ill pay will be tolerable because it will be seen to be a vital national security interest now So what every president is looking for is not it is saying when will the cost to me of putting the pressure I need to put on Israel to stop it be lower than the costs of allowing Israel to continue fighting In past wars those wars have been so quick thats been an easier question In this context its been a tougher one for the Biden administration And its a its a sharper learning curve I dont think as many people in the Biden administration understand the history as well as they should be understanding \nSCORING BUMP\nSEAN Okay So this war wont stop until the United States says stop SCORING OUT \nSEAN But when is that gonna happenSCORING BACK IN Autobahn Kirche \nSEAN More with the professor when we return on Today Explained \nSCORING OUT Autobahn Kirche\nBREAK\nBUMPER\nSEAN Today Explained is back with Professor Ian Lustick who said earlier in the show that Israels wars end when a superpower says they should NOT when Israel achieves their aims \nCLIP ISRAEL PM NETANYAHU Were absolutely committed to achieving our war games our war goals \nSCORING Bees Ambient B\nCLIP NETANYAHU Destroying Hamas \nIAN To prevent any one from ruling or having influence in Gaza who will educate children to hate Israel\nCLIP NETANYAHU Releasing our hostages \nIAN To establish a buffer zone controlled by Israel inside this small Gaza Strip all along the border to distance the Palestinian population from Israeli settlements inside of Israel proper \nCLIP NETANYAHU Making sure Gaza doesnt become a threat again \nIAN To prevent the Palestinian Authority of having any role in the reconstruction or rule of Gaza \nCLIP NETANYAHU Making sure that we can return our citizens in the North and in the South \nIAN and of course a war aim not to have to rebuild Gaza Have other people do it even though it was Israel that did the destruction So those are just part of the list that you can find\nCLIP NETANYAHU And for that well apply maximum power with maximum precision everywhere thats needed \nSCORING OUT\nSEAN So how has President Biden responded to Netanyahus war aims here and how has his response changed over the course of these hundred days of war \nIAN Well I think the most dramatic thing that we saw was right after the Hamas Islamic Jihad attack United States turned on the green light which is what the United States typically does when Israel is at a war oh go ahead defend yourself or do whatever you call defending yourself\nCLIP PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN My administration was in close touch with your leadership from the first moments of this attack Were going to make sure we have you have what you need to protect your people to defend your nation And later this week Im going to ask the United States Congress for unprecedented support package for Israels defense\nIAN However within a few days the Biden administration realized that there were extreme there were forces in Israel who wanted to attack Lebanon The United States was concerned as it always gets concerned in Middle Eastern wars that its larger regional and international interests would start to be impacted Biden became very concerned I think at the comments by some Israeli leaders that We should actually reduce our effort against Hamas and attack Hezbollah now Weve always wanted to do that This is a window of international acceptance But Israel would go through an unprecedented amount of damage And of course so would Lebanon Thats the kind of war that Biden went to Israel to prevent On the surface it looked like he was there to support Israel And he was But youll notice that it wasnt him who was embracing Netanyahu Netanyahu embraced Biden Netanyahu desperately needed that sign \nSEAN Hm IAN But what was going on politically was that once the United States American president is there if Israel does something right away after the president is there it implicates America as if America had told Israel yes attack Lebanon And that is not something that an Israeli government can do It cannot betray America so completely So thats one thing that we have to understand The question of whether this catastrophe is going to become a super catastrophe \nSEAN But but still I feel like you saw from the the bear hug with Netanyahu to President Biden urging caution about the civilian death toll in Gaza you did see a sort of progression in his approach where he started to caution and warn Netanyahu more in say month two month three \nIAN You used the word caution I think thats right I said at the beginning the United States turned on the green light When Biden went there and started talking about war crimes international law You have to respect international law Hes turning on the yellow light The caution light It got brighter and brighter but its not red yet And thats the question when is it going to turn red Now when the United States plays footsie with UN security resolutions and seems to maybe be prepared to support one even if it hasdoesnt have any teeth Its brightening that yellow light when they allow a resolution to go through the calls for a ceasefire or when they tell Israel theyre going to Thats a red light Thats why those resolutions constantly being proposed at the UN Security Council are very important Theyre important because we can see how close the United States is to ending the war \nSEAN From all the history that you carry around with yourself that youve lived through that youve studied what will Netanyahu do to trigger the red light \nIAN I dont think its necessarily anything that Netanyahu himself will do that he hasnt already done Uh I think part of it will be the realization that you cant end the war in the Gulf with the Houthis until the Gaza War ends and you cant eliminate the probability of escalation in the Gulf or in Lebanon until the war ends in Gaza There is a constant danger There have been over Palestinians killed in the West Bank since the beginning of this war These are things that the Biden administration can only lose Its losing politically already The progressive wing of the party uh is weakening its support for President Biden Thats a crucial issue for him This is new We havent seen that kind of political factor in the equations that presidents have had to solve uh in the midst of Middle Eastern wars before So its hard for me to predict exactly how important it is but Im pretty sure that it will mean something as this election cycle moves forward \nSEAN Im glad you brought up the election because I do wonder if this isnt resolved by November what it looks like if President Biden loses the election \nIAN If he loses the election I mean I dont see any real difference in a waySEAN HmIAN That is to say the Trump administration If you look at the Trump administration and the Obama administration the trajectory of Israeli policies and the status of peace negotiations was the same They didnt go anywhere And and the settlement continued and the prospects for peace were zero So I dont really see much of a difference between the second Obama administration and the Trump administration And I dont see much difference in the Biden administration The Biden administration was doing nothing to advance a peace process This is getting into another topic But when this war ends the when the shooting stops there will be a renewal of a of a pseudo peace process because the image of a two state solution peace process is politically valuable to a president even if he knows that it never will be success The idea of doing something of seeming to do something of keeping alive the image of that possibility is very important not just for the United States but for Israeli governments for the Palestinian Authority which gets hundreds of millions of dollars in aid every year from the international community and from peace process industry You know people like me and foundations who are constantly trying to find ways to bring peace or at least raise money for their organizations in the hopes that those that peace process will work But thats another thats the question of you know were were going to see a diplomatic theater about a four year diplomatic theater once this uh shooting stops \nSEAN Do you think there could be a outcome from this particular conflict that would prevent another one in or years that could break this cycle that youve alluded to where eventually the United States or the UN has to step in and say Thats enough\nIAN Well I think so I think its possible I dont think its very likely but its possible Uh and one of the things there is I could be surprised by the effect of the devastating losses that Israel has experienced and the effect of the global isolation that Israel is going to experience as a result of the impressions that most of the globe has about what Israel is doing in Gaza Those two things could impact Israeli public opinion in a way that produces a leadership that rejects whats called the mowing the lawn strategy that every three years we need a war not to convince the Arabs that we can live with but just to destroy their capabilities to attack us for another couple of years Now if that were abandoned Israel would have to come up with an actual image of peace \nSCORING Sharp Clear\nIAN There are so many issues and theyre so emotional Uh the pain that Jews and Palestinians have been suffering is incalculable And my hope is that the ignorance which most people have about this conflict can be reduced and that people can start to grapple with the real issues and not the issues that arise from fantasies that they have about this conflict \nSCORING BUMPSEAN Professor Emeritus Ian Lustick Political science U Penn Hes got a whole bunch of books about this conflict most recently Paradigm Lost From Two State Solution to One State Reality \nOur program today was produced by Isabel Angell and Amanda Lewellyn We were edited by Amina AlSadi mixed by David Herman and fact checked by Laura Bullard with help from Hady Mawajdeh and Haleema Shah \nToday Explained is honored to now air on Connecticut Public Radio WNPR Hello Susan Thank you for listening \n SECONDS OF SILENCE
6 January Buy me to the moon\nHALF SECOND OF SILENCE\nBILLBOARD\nNOEL Lawmakers convened on Capitol Hill this week to politely but definitively put the screws to NASA\nSCORING IN The Other Side of the Beat APM\nCLIP Chairman Frank Lucas Last week NASA announced the delay of Artemis to September and Artemis to I look forward to hearing from NASA about the cause of these delays FADE DOWN HERE\nNOEL The Artemis missions will return man and woman this time to the moon The US has competition from Chinese astronauts from an UNMANNED Japanese craft that moonlanded literally today \nCLIP JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY it looks like it has reached on the moon \nNOEL This modern space race is very expensive So NASA is turning to the commercial space sector thats dominated by powerful CEOs your Elon Musks and your Jeff Bezoses They strike out too an American companys moon lander crashed just this week but they can AFFORD It \nNOEL The race for the moon coming up on Today Explained \nCLIP To the moon\nTHEME\nNOEL Im Noel King Chris Davenport covers NASA and the space industry for the Washington Post Hes been covering the big space news which if you havent been following closely is that the US is planning to go BACK to the moon So hows that going\nCHRIS So this was actually a plan uh called Artemis that was born during the Trump administration where they decided they wanted to focus NASA on returning astronauts to the moon under the Obama administration it had been this journey to Mars\nCLIP NASA VIDEO President Barack Obama I understand that some believe we should attempt to return to the surface of the moon first as previously planned But I just have to say pretty bluntly here weve been there before\nCHRIS And the Trump administration came in and said no we want to we want to go back to the moon\nCLIP PBS NEWSHOUR\nPresident Donald Trump Were dreaming big This is a giant step toward that inspiring future and toward reclaiming Americas proud destiny in space \nCHRIS And NASAs initial plan was to get astronauts there by The Trump administration came and said no we want to do that by this incredibly ambitious timeline that few thought was actually possible and as it turns out it was not possible But what was significant is that the Biden administration embraced the Artemis program And that is the first time you have had subsequent presidential administrations embrace uh a moon mission or a deep space human spaceflight mission since the Apollo era\nTAPE President Joseph Biden The mission youre about to go on the United States can return people to the moon is hard to believe for the first time in over years and the worst part is I can remember exactly where I was when they announced that man landed on the moon Doesnt mean Im old means you guys are moving quickly \nCHRIS So they did keep the Artemis program which is a big deal But the timeline however is changing And they came in and said initially is not feasible Uh were going to hope to do it by Now as we know just recently they announced uh thats going to uh slip somewhat significantly\nCLIP NASA VIDEO\nNASA Administrator Bill Nelson So what I want to tell you is we are adjusting our schedule to target Artemis II for September of and September of for Artemis III which will send humans for the first time to the lunar south pole \nCHRIS Theres going to be the next mission which will have four astronauts in the Orion capsule in the spacecraft and it will fly around the moon and it wont land on the moon itll fly around it and that is being pushed back to September of next year and the lunar landing uh about a year after that showing just how difficult these missions can be\nNOEL Man has been to the moon Joe Biden and President Trump were both alive for it Why If weve been there and weve done it are these two successive presidents who run the United States government why are they so keen to get us back to the moon \nCHRIS The moon today in some ways is not the moon that we visited in the late s and early s during the Apollo era \nSCORING IN EMERALDS APM\nCLIP CBS NEWS ARCHIVE\nNeil Armstrong Tranquility Base here the eagle has landed \nHouston Roger Tranquility we copy you on the ground you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue were breathing again thanks a lot\nWalter Cronkite laughs\nCHRIS What we know about it today is that uh its not dry Theres water on the moon There is water in the form of ice at the poles of the moon particularly in the south pole of the moon and so thats where NASA and the white House wants to go And water is important because its not just um a water to drink and if you can break it up oxygen to breathe but the component parts hydrogen and oxygen can also be used as rocket fuel Um and if you can mine the water and then separate the parts um that is a very big deal that could allow uh broader exploration of the solar system and particularly getting to Mars The other thing thats different now its not just the United States Um I mean we have this Cold War space race during Apollo with the Soviet Union\nCLIP NASA VIDEO\nPresident John F Kennedy The dramatic achievement in space should have made clear to us all as did the Sputnik in the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination on which road they should take\nCHRIS now its with China And uh because of the presence of water and because of the presence of other resources there both countries want to set up a more permanent presence and really stay there and build a base and an enduring presence in order to uh take advantage of the resources there which again is very different from Apollo where we went the astronauts stayed for a couple of days and then they left and they came home and now they want to go and really go but to stay\nSCORING OUT\nNOEL When NASA does send astronauts to the moon as its planning to do what is that mission going to look like \nCHRIS Well the first mission um you know will be something uh similar to the previous ones\nCLIP NASA VIDEO\nThe space launch system is now on its maiden voyage to the moon And here we go \nCHRIS because that first mission wont be an enduring one The astronauts will go and they will come home They need to test out the hardware But what will be significant about it is while the uh rocket and the spacecraft that get the astronauts to the moon the lunar lander the spacecraft that theyll transfer to to get them to the surface of the moon wont be owned and operated by NASA Itll be owned and operated by a private company On the first mission itll be uh spacex which is obviously uh Elon Musks company \nCLIP ELON MUSK In order for the Artemis program to succeed we must succeed with Starship Like I said we actually want to far exceed what NASAs asked us to do \nCHRIS NASA is trying to harness the growing capability in the commercial space sector And so uh SpaceX won that contract to build the spacecraft known as Starship to uh ferry astronauts to and from uh the lunar surface And um on subsequent missions I wont just be SpaceX Itll be Blue Origin which is Jeff Bezoss company \nTAPE Jeff Bezos The lunar lander were developing for NASA the Mark II lander thats part of the Artemis program they call it the sustaining lander program \nCHRIS Um because theyve also won a contract to build a lander capable of taking astronauts um to the moon And this is the way actually NASAs been going for some time building out these public private partnerships Um it started with uh flying cargo and supplies to the International Space Station and science experiments Not people um but but payloads and cargo uh that evolved into flying cargo to flying people to the International Space Station And SpaceX does that now And Boeing also uh has a contract to do that They havent been able yet to fly astronauts there but Boeing is working on it and its first flight could come as soon as April Um and now theyre extending that paradigm all the way out to the moon and having these public private partnerships because you know weve got this growing commercial space sector that we just did not have \nNOEL So when the rocket goes up Im thinking of the rocket going up into the air And for whatever reason I can see in my brain the rocket has NASA written on the side of it Um youre saying the rockets will be owned by private companies Is it going to have like Spacex written on the side instead of NASA \nCHRIS Well it depends on which rocket It depends on which mission In the Artemis program the program going to the moon um you have a mix of the old and the new The rocket that will take off uh from Earth is NASAs rocket Its called the Space Launch System Uh it is owned and operated by NASA and is built um by taxpayers The rocket or the spacecraft rather that will meet up with the astronauts in orbit around the moon and then take them down to the surface and then take them back off the surface And that will be a commercial spacecraft Um so and thats whats so interesting And you see the evolution of these programs and where and the Artemis Moon missions theyre sort of combining both types of systems \nNOEL Do you think theres any danger in the private sector playing such a large role in in space travel and space flight Working so closely with NASA \nCHRIS Yeah I mean youve got a lot of power right now in the hands of a few companies and thats a concern I mean particularly if those companies were to go away that capability which NASA needs um would be lost Um part of the problem is that its dominated in large part by SpaceX SpaceX is the only way that NASA is able to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station um you know for a long time we were unable to do that I mean the space shuttle had retired in and NASA was forced to rely on Russia to fly its astronauts to the space station And now SpaceX does it Um as I mentioned earlier NASA had also awarded a contract to Boeing to do this to create some incentive to create a competition between the two companies and to have a backup in case something happened to SpaceX But Boeing has not been able to deliver They have not been able to fly astronauts leading leaving space as the sole provider So I think NASA would really like to have Boeing on board uh charging ahead uh competing with SpaceX because when you have competition its not just to drive down the price it will increase efficiencies and safety and redundancy and all of that \nSCORING IN KAPT KFC APM\nCLIP NASA VIDEO\nNASA Administrator Bill Nelson We want more competition We want two landers It means you have reliability You have back ups It benefits NASA and it benefits the American people \nCHRIS So I think a lot of people are looking at it and think it will be better and a little bit more fair and equal Once there are more companies that are able to get out there and to compete \nBREAK\nBUMPER\nNOEL Its Today Explained my copilot Chris Davenport is the space reporter for the Washington Post Chris in the first half of the show we talked about Artemis and the mission to the moon Lets talk now about the International Space Station what it is and where IT fits into these changes to NASAs priorities\nCHRIS The International Space Station is an orbiting laboratory and it has been uh a foothold in space where uh people have been living continuously uh for more than years And if you just think about that thats pretty amazing that there has always been a human being in space for the past years or so \nCLIP CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY \nAstronaut We even recycle our urine\nChildren EWWWW\nCHRIS astronauts go up there and they conduct science experiments Um the other benefit of the International Space Station it sort of shows the soft power diplomacy of NASA and how it binds international partners together \nCLIPNASA VIDEO\nRoscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov And also I want to point out again how important it is to work together right now you see nationalities here and we are looking forward to work together\nCHRIS So on the International Space Station you have NASA working with the European Space Agency working with Japan and of course working with its main partner Russia So even when there have been geopolitical tensions on the ground particularly with Russias invasion of Ukraine that partnership in space has continued to to operate \nNOEL The private sector has gotten involved with the moon missions Is the private sector at all getting involved with the International Space Station \nCHRIS They are uh NASA is looking at the the ISS and realizing that its been up there in the harsh vacuum of space for more than two decades And as they look ahead particularly as they focus on the moon NASA is saying they dont have the budget to go out and build another space station but they dont want to lose their hold in lowEarth orbit They want to keep astronauts going to lowEarth orbit And so theyre looking to the private sector to build commercial habitats uh in space that NASA would continue to use but they would use it as a customer one customer potentially many other customers on these commercial space stations\nNOEL Okay So are companies going to be bidding Uh or approaching NASA Are they going to be competing to build the new International Space Station How will this work \nCHRIS Yeah Thats right NASA has already had a competition They had the first round \nCLIPFOX HOUSTON\nPrivate companies have until February th to submit a design protocol to dock and eventually crash the space station on earth \nSCORING IN LONELY SHUTTLE\nCHRIS you have um uh Blue Origin again Jeff Bezos in space company is uh leading the effort on one side with some other partner uh companies and um a company called NanoRacks on the other side and Voyager space that are have are receiving uh tens of or hundreds of millions of dollars to build their commercial space stations\nCLIP CBS NEWS\nVoyager CEO Dylan Taylor We as a country cant have a gap in terms of capability in low earth orbit so its really important that we commercialize low earth orbit in anticipation of the ISS being off line as early as \nCHRIS Theres another company called Axiom Space that actually begun uh building their space station even before this\nCLIP THE HILL\nAxiom CEO Michael Suffredini We competed for a contract with NASA we won that back in January from there weve been working on developing the worlds first commercial space station Well assemble it attached to the International Space Station starting in late \nCHRIS Theyre based in in Houston and hope within a couple of years to send up a module that would actually connect with the International Space Station so they can test it and see how it works And then eventually it would detach and become a free flier and they would build on that So yes youre seeing again this extension of uh the commercialization of space and these public private partnerships with NASA uh uh move into a new arena that traditionally had been the exclusive domain of governments \nSCORING OUT \nNOEL What would an international space station built by private companies look like Is it going to be is it going to be nicer laughs\nCHRIS I think so I mean I think uh yeah I mean uh Axiom for example has hired you know this French architect and they want the design to be uh much more modern And to the extent that it can be comfortable and plush whereas the ISS you know if youve been to a federal office building here in office you know Washington DC its you know its its its you know functioning but not very stylish And a commercial station I think would be more stylish \nThere would be an emphasis on uh greater views of Earth So Axiom talks about having these big windows and sort of blue Origin because I think thats part of what you do now the ISS does have a cupola where astronauts do spend a lot of time Uh but theyre theyre Primarily to do science and research Um not to stargaze but I think if you have a commercial company um that may have some space tourists go up there theyre going to maximize uh comfort and and the views of space which you know if you talk to any astronaut they say those views of Earth from space are really profound \nNOEL But this newer plusher model of an ISS its still its main task would still be serving NASAs interests Theres no theres no competition over whos in charge of it \nCHRIS Well the commercial company would be in charge of it Its their space station\nNOEL Wow Yeah\nCHRIS NASA would use it and and rent space on it and be you know one customer of many customers and want to send up its astronauts to do research But you might have uh astronauts from other countries want to do this Other countries say that are not partners on the International Space Station who want to go up You might have um scientists from universities Uh you might want to have space tourists as I mentioned Um you might want to have um you know film production companies that want to you know film a really cool scene I mean theres talk that Tom cruise actually at some point would go to the International Space Station \nCLIP TOP GUN\nMAVERICK I feel the need the need FOR SPEED\nMAVERICK AND GOOSE OWWW\nCHRIS and you could see uh more marketing uh TV commercials film filmed in space that sort of thing I mean I think once you open it up uh to the commercial sector its whatever people can come up with where they think they can make money\nNOEL Im not anti private business Im Im in a lot of ways very probusiness But I do wonder I do wonder about Elon Musk being the one who has the comptroller frankly any any you know any CEO of any company having control over all of this making the decisions about all of this\n while NASA uh you know rents out a couple of rooms Youve been youve been covering space for a long time You also strike me as a very levelheaded reporter Do you think that we society lose something when space travel when space exploration when hanging out in lowEarth or lowEarth orbit goes totally private \nCHRIS You know NASAs its its there for the taxpayer Its there for the purpose of the United States and for the country Right Um these missions um you know during the early days you think of you know John Glenn and Neil Armstrong and all these astronauts they were you know almost in a way like soldiers going off to combat and carrying the flag And it meant something to put an American flag on the moon And now opening up to commercial interests you wonder if space travel is in a way losing its dignity Um and you know particularly if all of a sudden youve got marketing and advertising \nCLIP WALLE\nNarrator Too much garbage in your face Theres plenty of space out in space BL Starliners leaving every day Well clean up the mess while youre away\nCHRIS we think of space and this expanse this sort of global commons for all of humankind now being taken over by corporations I think that is concerning Um other people though would say that thats the sort of natural evolution of things that um government you know pioneered all sorts of travel like you know commercial aviation for example And now its just uh a routine part of our lives And um you know were able to go where we want And thats just the price of business And the commercial industry has shown that it can move faster and it can be better in a lot of ways than the government which is you know as perhaps it should be uh buried under these layers of bureaucracy where a company can be much more efficient But you do wonder if there shouldnt be a better balance uh of the two somehow But I do think with the commercial space commercialization of space you are losing those early days in the sort of probity and the sort of nostalgia that we had for that era Its almost like you know where have you gone John Glenn Um uh because we dont have that anymore with whether its Elon or Jeff or Richard Branson uh or any of them I mean its just markedly different \nNOEL It also strikes me that space space travel space exploration wasnt ultimately profitable enough for NASA This is expensive stuff And the return on it is you know open to interpretationDid you ever manage to ask any of these big CEOs like uh how are you going to make money off of this \nCHRIS Thats the big question Um at what point do we sort of go into the tipping point where there is a selfsustaining space economy where it can stand on its own And when I say that I mean without NASA or really the Pentagon as well because you know the Pentagon has enormous interest in space and also relies on all of these companies and gives them millions if not billions of dollars in contracts Um but when do we get to the point where um its no longer driven by the government and these companies arent dependent on the government and it is clear that we are not there yet and it is unclear whether we will ever get there\nSCORING IN Day Trip BMC\nCLIP ELON MUSK We want to go far beyond the NASA requirement and actually be able to put enough payload on the moon with enough frequency that you could actually have a permanently occupied moon base Thats the next really big threshold from Apollo is have an actual moon base \nCHRIS but whether that model will continue as we move out you know from lowEarth orbit to the moonand if theres you know any kind of economic activity on and around the moon that remains to be seen and if thats going to happen its not going to be really uh anytime soon \nSCORING BUMP\nNOEL Chris Davenport his book is The Space Barons Victoria Chamberlin produced todays show and Matthew Collette edited Laura Bullard factchecked and Patrick Boyd engineered Im Noel King Its Today Explained\n SECONDS OF SILENCE
date title sentiment
1 2024-01-11 1_11_24_ Elections everywhere all at once.docx 29.65
2 2024-01-12 1_12_24_ Hollywood’s secret musicals.docx 31.50
3 2024-01-16 1_16_24_ Iowa Caucused.docx 29.35
4 2024-01-17 1_17_24_ Cocaine problems.docx -16.75
5 2024-01-18 1_18_24_ How the war in Gaza ends.docx 8.95
6 2024-01-19 1_19_24_ Buy me to the moon.docx 39.60Blog 1
Sentiment Analysis on Vox Podcasts: Insights into the Voice of News
In the modern era it seems that people are moving farther and farther away from print media. With the advent of the 24 hour news cycle started at the turn of the century and the ever present diminishing attention span, People are now consuming their news in different media than their parents generation. Even as newspapers evolve more to be online in forms of online posts and websites, more people are more engaged in media that can be listened to. So as news changes the way it is dispersed how does that change the way news is received?
In our project we are specifically looking at the “sentiment” of podcast episodes and news articles. First we wanted to get a consistent type of content from both the articles and the podcast. So we decided that meant we used the same source for both, Vox. Vox has both a news podcast section called “Voxxed: Explained” and a standard print news section.
Big Questions
Given the breadth and depth of Vox’s catalog of articles and podcasts, we decided to focus on two main areas in the comparison between Vox podcasts and articles.
What is the overall sentiment across Vox’s podcasts, and how does it vary by topic?
Does sentiment shift during specific episodes, perhaps reflecting the emotional arc of the conversation?
We conducted this analysis on all vox podcasts and vox articles up to December 16th 2024.
Getting the Data
We scraped 1980 articles from 2024-2025 from the vox.com website using the rvest package. We filtered articles that were chronologies / timelines of major events that occurred those aren’t exactly articles. We also removed articles that were aggregations of links to other articles but had little to no text.
We downloaded all the 256 podcast transcripts from the vox google drive. We removed all non-alphanumeric letters since they didn’t provide any emotional connotation.
Word Frequency Analysis
We first analyzed the distribution of words in vox podcasts and vox articles. We took the top twenty most frequent words out of the vox podcasts and vox articles. We removed words that provided no emotional meaning like “and” and “the”.
For vox podcasts, words like “like,” “know,” “think,” and “really” suggest that the conversational and relatable tone of Vox podcasts remains a strong characteristic. Recurring words like “Trump” and “Noel” indicate important and recurring characters on the show. In this case, “Noel” and “Sean” are both the authors of the podcast so their names are frequent words where the word “Trump” indicates that the Vox podcast talks about Trump a significant amount of the time.
In vox articles, we see similar informal language like “like” and “also”. The topics are similar with the word “Trump” ranking similarly highly among vox articles. This suggests both vox podcasts and articles have a slightly positive to neutral tone
We can visualize these word frequencies in a word cloud. Below is the word cloud for vox podcasts. The green word “people” and smaller in size purple word “right” indicate that Vox podcast is a human-centric podcast focused on correct decisions in terms of societal good.
The vox article word cloud shows many of the same words but notably, the word “know” is missing. Of note, many of the smaller words on the vox article word cloud indicate much more formal language. For example words like “government”, state” and “law” in the vox articles can be constrasted with words like “things”, “part” and “yeah” from the vox podcast.
Overall, this suggests that while both vox podcasts and articles have a generally informal and approachable tone, vox articles are more formal than vox podcasts.
However, word frequency cannot tell the full story since it lacks the temporal and sequential nature of podcasts and articles. These metrics are aggregated over all podcasts and articles so we cannot know exactly when an the tone shifts in a conversation in a podcast or an article. As such we performed a more rigorous analysis of the sentiment in vox articles and podcasts using the package Syuzhet.
Sentiment Analysis
You might be asking what is sentiment analysis? how does it work? Well sentiment analysis is a technique used to determine the emotional tone behind a body of text.
In our analysis, we used a simple form a sentiment analysis that assigns every word with an emotional valence. Binary sentiment analysis will simply find if a word evokes a positive emotion or a negative emotion. There are more complex forms of sentiment analysis that take in multiple emotions. For example, the NRC Emotion Lexicon is a resource developed by the National Research Council of Canada that maps each individual word to an numerical value of emotion ie anger, fear, joy. We decided to use the Syuzhet sentiment analysis package since the process of building our own model would not have been as accurate or efficient as a pre-built model.
Pre-processing
We conducted the majority of our analysis in the year 2024-2025 since that was the year with the most consistent podcast upload schedule from vox.
To do this, we split each podcast transcript into their individual words and pass each word through through a sentiment analysis pipeline. The pipeline takes each word from the transcript and assign it a sentiment value. For instance the word “love” has a sentiment value of 0.75, while the value of “murder” is -0.75.
How do we get these sentiment values? Since language is so ambiguous, we have expert linguists label the numerical sentiment of each word without any context. These numerical values are aggregated into a larger dictionary or lexicon like the Syzuhet dictionary or the NRC Emotion Lexicon. We used both the Syzuhet dictionary and NRC Emotion Lexicon to perform our sentiment analysis.
We first pre-processed the data for binary sentiment analysis.
After cleaning and pre-processing, we found the sentiment scores for each podcast. There are some things to note. First, the news is moderately pretty positive, and podcast are even moreso! The sentiment for articles are about a positive 8.25 on average on average while the average for podcasts seem are 15.12, double that of articles. This is odd since normally the news is associated with fear and negativity.
If our model of language is correct and we can sum the sentiment of multiple words together, we can make a judgement that the podcasts are more positive than the articles.
# A tibble: 1 × 2
title sentiment
<chr> <dbl>
1 A year after October 7: How Hamas’s attack and Israel’s response br… -59.2 title sentiment
1 6_17_24_ Save Darfur Again.docx -33.4Digging deeper into the data, we decided to isolate the podcasts and articles with the best and worst sentiments. We found that the both articles and podcast were about wars in the middle east. Specifically, those wars were the Hamas-Israel conflict and the Sudanese civil war respectively.
# A tibble: 1 × 2
title sentiment
<chr> <dbl>
1 What if you could have a panic attack, but for joy? 67.8 title sentiment
1 3_8_24_ Bringing back the SAT.docx 55.55By contrast the best article and podcast sentiment were on completely different topics. The best sentiment article was about having panic attacks about joy whereas the best sentiment podcast was about bringing back the SAT.
Sentiment over 2024
Our sentiment analysis of articles and podcasts over the year 2024 reveals similar trends and behaviors across the two media formats.
For articles, the sentiment scores jump around with a mix of positive and negative values, but overall, we notice a slight upward trend, showing that articles become a bit more positive as the year goes on. Most of the scores cluster near neutral, which tells us that articles tend to stay pretty steady and balanced. We believe this may be due to editorial choices that keep the news source consistent.
`geom_smooth()` using method = 'gam' and formula = 'y ~ s(x, bs = "cs")'
For podcasts, we see a much more slightly dynamic pattern. There’s a slight rise in positive sentiment around the middle of the year, but then it starts to dip again as the year wraps up. This suggests podcasts might be responding to changing events or themes over time. Podcasts seem to exhibit sharper sentiment scores in the greater than 40 in the negative and positive direction indicating people may use stronger words in conversation compared to text.
`geom_smooth()` using method = 'loess' and formula = 'y ~ x'
Sentiment over the best and worst texts
For the podcasts and articles with the worst and best sentiment score. We plotted the sentiment score over narrative time (were one point in narrative time correlating with a word in the text). We took the ten word moving average for each point in narrative time since the data was extremely volatile.
Worst Sentiment Scores
For both the worst sentiment article and worst sentiment podcast, both their moving average trended below 0 for the majority of narrative time. There seems to be a slight trend upward at narrative time ~800 in the article sentiment moving average but the majority of moving average stays below 0 still during that time. The narrative time for the article is longer than the narrative time for the podcast.
Warning: Removed 9 rows containing missing values or values outside the scale range
(`geom_line()`).
Warning: Removed 9 rows containing missing values or values outside the scale range
(`geom_line()`).
Best Sentiment Scores
For the podcast best sentiment score, the sentiment score stays fairly neutral, with small fluctuations above zero for most of the narrative. We notice a sharp dip midway through, which could indicate a particularly negative segment before returning to balance. The overall tone remains steady without big swings, except for that standout drop.
For the article best sentiment score, the sentiment score stays above 0 by a significant margin. There’s much more varability and like the worst sentiment score, the article has a longer narrative time than the article.
article_bestWarning: Removed 9 rows containing missing values or values outside the scale range
(`geom_line()`).
podcast_bestWarning: Removed 9 rows containing missing values or values outside the scale range
(`geom_line()`).
Comparing emotional levels across articles and podcasts
Looking at the specific emotional content of the words we find that both the articles and the podcast are very similar, almost exactly the same in percentage. We can see that vox prioritizes trust in their news coverage more than anything else. This seems like a positive marker for the new source since it brings credibility to their reporting. Although we can still see fear still has a relatively high percentage of words in our article-podcast dataset.
nrc_emotional_levels_viz
Conclusions
In conclusion, our sentiment analysis of Vox podcasts and articles from 2024 revealed some interesting insights into how news media tone varies across different formats. Overall, we found that both podcasts and articles maintain a relatively neutral to slightly positive tone on average. However, podcasts exhibited more variability and stronger sentiment swings in both the positive and negative directions compared to articles. This suggests the more conversational nature of podcasts allows for greater emotional range and dynamism, while articles adhere to a steadier, more balanced tone, likely due to editorial standards. When examining the best and worst sentiment scores, the lowest scoring podcast and article both focused on coverage of conflicts and wars, while the most positive podcast and article covered more light-hearted, emotionally uplifting content. Across both media, our emotional analysis showed that words related to trust were most prevalent, indicating vox’s focus on credibility in its reporting. However, words associated with fear were also notably frequent, perhaps unavoidable in news coverage. In short, while both media follow similar sentiment trends overall, key differences emerge in their variability, topical drivers of extreme emotions, and format-specific patterns.
As with any analysis, our work has some limitations worth noting. Firstly, our dataset focuses solely on Vox media, so our findings may not be generalizable to other news outlets. Vox’s editorial slant, target audience and topical focus is unique, so sentiment patterns we observed may not hold for drastically different media entities, such as those with an overt political bias or niche focus. Furthermore, the Syuzhet sentiment analysis package, while a powerful tool, is not infallible - it relies on predetermined word scores which may not always perfectly capture the nuanced emotions of a text, especially for words whose meaning is highly context-dependent. We also only focused on overall valence (positive vs negative) rather than more complex emotional states. Finally, by analyzing data from a single year, our findings offer a snapshot in time, but sentiment may evolve in the long run based on shifting news cycles and sociopolitical climates. To build on this exploratory work, future analyses could expand the dataset across different news sources, compare multiple years, and explore more granular emotional analysis.
Work Cited:
https://saifmohammad.com/WebPages/NRC-Emotion-Lexicon.htm
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/syuzhet/vignettes/syuzhet-vignette.html
https://stackoverflow.com/
R Version
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time zone: America/Chicago
tzcode source: internal
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
other attached packages:
[1] lubridate_1.9.3 forcats_1.0.0 stringr_1.5.1 dplyr_1.1.4
[5] purrr_1.0.2 readr_2.1.5 tidyr_1.3.1 tibble_3.2.1
[9] ggplot2_3.5.1 tidyverse_2.0.0
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Matrix_1.7-0 gtable_0.3.5 jsonlite_1.8.8 compiler_4.4.1
[5] tidyselect_1.2.1 splines_4.4.1 scales_1.3.0 yaml_2.3.10
[9] fastmap_1.2.0 lattice_0.22-6 R6_2.5.1 labeling_0.4.3
[13] generics_0.1.3 knitr_1.48 htmlwidgets_1.6.4 munsell_0.5.1
[17] pillar_1.9.0 tzdb_0.4.0 rlang_1.1.4 utf8_1.2.4
[21] stringi_1.8.4 xfun_0.47 timechange_0.3.0 cli_3.6.3
[25] mgcv_1.9-1 withr_3.0.1 magrittr_2.0.3 digest_0.6.37
[29] grid_4.4.1 rstudioapi_0.16.0 hms_1.1.3 nlme_3.1-164
[33] lifecycle_1.0.4 vctrs_0.6.5 evaluate_0.24.0 glue_1.7.0
[37] farver_2.1.2 fansi_1.0.6 colorspace_2.1-1 rmarkdown_2.28
[41] tools_4.4.1 pkgconfig_2.0.3 htmltools_0.5.8.1